SNL Will Be Missed During Strike, But Not Too Much

[NOTE: The following article will also appear as my regular television column for WILDsound.]

For most of the television universe, when it comes to viewers, the writers strike is kind of like eating Doritos: We know it’s bad for us, but we put it out of our minds because the damage will occur down the road. Despite the strike, networks have enough episodes of most of their prime time series to make it through the calendar year. So, the strike has limited immediate impact in prime time. While the daily talk shows have been a casualty of the walkout, it looks like we will soon see the first weekly program to be shut down: “Saturday Night Live.”

It took me a while to realize that SNL would be waylaid by the strike, because, really, I didn’t really care that much. Tell me that I have to go weeks without “30 Rock” or “The Office,” or even without new favorites like “Aliens in America” and “Samantha Who?”, and I would immediately start reaching for the Xanax. But no SNL? Well, that’s 40 minutes saved on Sundays, when I generally buzz through the previous night’s episode on my TiVo.

Taking the position that SNL isn’t as good as it used to be is about as current, groundbreaking and interesting as a Dan Quayle joke. But that doesn’t change the fact that SNL isn’t as good as it used to be.

In the past, SNL has gone through its ups and downs. But the current downward trend has been longer than any other in the sketch pioneer’s more than 30-year history. Will Ferrell left the show in May 2001, beginning a talent drain that has not been reversed. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the Weekend Update chair, where the Ferrell-era team of Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon has evolved into a pairing of Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers. The Fey/Fallon Update segment was must-see television. The Poehler-Meyers edition is occasionally amusing.

And that is really the problem with SNL. When it started, it was so daring and new, it became appointment television. I remember being a kid and looking forward all week to the next episode to see what craziness would go on (yeah, I know, I needed to get a life, but I digress ...). Even as SNL became more formulaic and corporate, the show still managed to feel the pulse of the culture and deliver funny and cutting observations, from Dana Carvery’s George Bush, to Phil Hartman’s (and later Darrell Hammond’s) Bill Clinton, and with all the pop culture of-the-moment figures in between (for some reason, Ben Affleck lusting after Chris Kattan’s male stripper Mango leaps to mind). But now? Other than a handful of exceptions I’ll get to later, what does SNL do that gets people talking anymore?

This year has featured four original episodes, three of which were hosted by men who were not primarily actors or comics (LeBron James, Jon Bon Jovi and Brian Williams). Again, putting aside some select exceptions, how many memorable moments has the season offered? Can you think of one sketch from any of those episodes that made you laugh (other than ones that started the show)? I’m hard-pressed. I liked the 2007 National Douchebag Championships during Seth Rogen’s show, especially the different types of annoying guys featured. I can’t think of another segment from this season that I thought rose above the level of mildly amusing. I went back and looked at a list of this season’s sketches to refresh my memory, figuring I must have forgotten something, but I really didn’t. I thought Williams did a good job as the fireman guest on “Bronx Beat.” After that, I’m out.

Look, I know that every era of SNL, even the vaunted Belushi years, had a ton of lame sketches that didn’t go anywhere. It wasn’t a sea of Coneheads, “Sprockets” episodes and wannabe cheerleaders. The difference was that you knew that in most cases, there would be at least one bit (if not more) during the show that everyone would be talking about the next few days. In other words, there was an Aerosmith on “Wayne’s World” or “Sinatra Group” moment to make it all worthwhile. That quality is missing from this year’s sketches, and has been for quite some time.

It is fitting that the first sketch after the monologue on the season premiere revolved around Kristen Wiig’s Penelope character, the annoyingly high-pitched woman who has the need to one-up everyone. The character is tired, and the Penelope sketches have one joke and nowhere to go. It’s enough already. Similarly, this year we’ve had to endure Will Forte’s MacGyver parody, McGruber, again, which literally plays out the same one joke (McGruber gets distracted from disabling a bomb and it blows up) over and over again. Same for Bill Hader’s Italian talk show host. Doing an entire sketch in Italian with a bewildered American guest might have been on the brave side when it debuted last season, but, again, now it just beats its one-joke premise into the ground. Even “Bronx Beat,” featuring Poehler and Maya Rudolph as bored, middle-aged Bronx natives hosting a talk show, is starting to feel played out. If I never again have to hear Rudolph say terrible things about her husband but then get choked up because she loves him, I can still live a full and satisfying life. Which really applies to nearly every SNL sketch this season.

So, if I think so little of the show, why do I TiVo it every week? Habit, sure, but there are three things that I actually think still generally work: The fake commercials, the cold opens and the digital shorts.

The fake commercials still manage to occasionally come up with something edgy enough not to demean a long tradition that includes classics like the Bass-O-Matic, Puppy Uppers and Oops I Crapped My Pants, just to name three. This season has included a clever send-up of the spots for the Sundance Channel’s “Iconoclasts” series, with SNL pairing Charles Barkley (Keenan Thompson) and Bjork (Wiig); Jason Sudeikis skewering Dane Cook’s incredibly annoying promos for the baseball playoffs was dead-on; and my favorite of all, the Veritas Ultrasound HD, so expectant fathers can actually see what their fetuses look like (with picture-in-picture, so father’s can also watch the game).

The cold open is the first sketch that airs, before the opening credits. On an episode of “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” last season, Matthew Perry’s character, the head writer, spends an entire episode obsessing about the cold open of the first episode since he returned to run the show. (Incidentally, the bit he comes up with is brilliant. Check it out on the DVD.) I feel like the current SNL takes the same approach. It’s as if they consciously want to make sure the cold open is memorable. If only they took the same attitude with the rest of the show.

The season premiere’s cold open was an address from the All-But-Certain-to-be-Next President, Hilary Clinton (Poehler). It was funny, and it cleverly lampooned the air of inevitability surrounding Clinton’s campaign. The next week, Andy Samberg opened the show as Kevin Federline, having fun with the idea that he was judged by a court to be a more-fit parent, which shows how far down Britney Spears’s life has spiraled. While less topical, the sketch that kicked of Bon Jovi’s turn as host featured Poehler as herself, circa 1986, angry because, among other things, she could not go to that night’s Bon Jovi show. The sketch was filled with cleverly observant comedy about the era and teenagers, with my favorite bit being Poehler bathing herself in enough hair spray to take down a good chunk of the ozone layer (it was 1986, after all). Finally, the cold open for the Brian Williams week, featuring a Halloween costume party at the Clintons’ house, was saved by the surprise of Barack Obama in a Barack Obama mask (poking fun at claims of Clinton’s lack of authenticity).

By the way, that means that in two of the four weeks, the show’s feature segment had Darrell Hammond playing Bill Clinton. Don’t get me wrong, Hammond does a great job portraying the former president as a fun-loving, women-chasing, wife-hating operator, but the fact that the show is still relying on its 90s stars to carry the load shows the dearth of new talent.

Except, that is, when it comes to the SNL Digital Shorts. Samberg, along with his writing partners Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone, put the feature on the map in December of 2005 with “Lazy Sunday,” a rap video parody about two guys who want to see “The Chronicles of Narnia.” The buzz really took off last season when Samberg teamed with Justin Timberlake for “Dick in a Box,” another music video, this time in a boy band style, that extolled the virtues of men gifting their manhood to their women. The digital shorts, despite low budgets and rushed schedules, manage to carry the bite and relevance that are missing in the rest of the program. This season’s highlight has been the music video “Iran So Far,” a comedic ode to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The “Punk’d” parody “People Getting Punched Right Before Eating” was pretty funny, and “A Day in the Life of Brian Williams” was even better. The digital short is the one must-see element of each episode, and one of the only reasons to keep watching SNL, much in the way Fey’s Update segment was earlier in the decade.

As an aside, I don’t have much to say about the music acts on SNL, but that has more to do with the current state of the music business than the artists invited onto the show. This season, SNL gets points for mixing quality established artists like Foo Fighters and Kanye West with less well-known critics’ darlings like Spoon and Feist.

So with the writers out on strike, I miss David Letterman and Jon Stewart far more than SNL. If only Samberg could post a weekly SNL Digital Short directly to YouTube. It would almost be like the show never left.

Bernstein Blames "Idiot Culture" for Political Mess, and I Agree

It’s so simple and tempting. You are on a news Web site, you see the link “Court Papers Reveal How Spears Spends,” and you think to yourself, “Why not?” I’ll admit it. I saw that headline and was tempted. A part of me wondered, “How does that talentless waste of flesh, bone and spandex blow her ill-gotten gain?” In the past, from time to time, I’d indulge my morbid curiosity and click on a story like that. Not anymore. It’s time to make a stand.

I was inspired by an article I read today about a speech given at a Connecticut prep school by Carl Bernstein, known to a generation as “the guy Dustin Hoffman played in ‘All the President’s Men,’” and, more importantly, a longtime editor and reporter for the Washington Post responsible for breaking the Watergate story. In the lecture, Bernstein partially defended the news media, blaming the “idiot culture” in the U.S. for creating a dysfunctional political environment in the country. He noted that news organizations are devoting more resources to celebrity stories, so serious issues, like Iraq and the Bush administration’s assault on the Constitution, have been shunted to the side.

I am a frequent basher of the news outlets, especially CNN, for wasting so much of their air time and/or space on sensational and celebrity-driven stories that are not really news. And I stand by my position. But it’s interesting that Bernstein has approached the issue from the other side, putting the blame at the feet of the culture that demands that the media cover nonsense. I have not let Americans off the hook, but, again, I find it remarkable (and, frankly, refreshing) that he has taken aim directly at the consumers of trash news.

“You can't separate the appetites and demands of the people themselves and what they are given," Bernstein was quoted as saying in an AP/Yahoo! News article. "The blame simply can't all be put at the feet of those who present news."

Bernstein admits that the “problems we have in news and journalism are about us not doing our job well enough." But he notes that the "ideal of providing the best available version of the truth is being affected by the dominance of a journalistic culture that has less and less to do with reality and context.”

And that is why I didn’t click on the article about Britney’s spending habits. I won’t be responsible for pumping up the number of clicks on the story, nor will I allow Yahoo! to earn one more penny of ad revenue from the companies putting banners next to the article. Below the Britney link, there were headlines for stories on the confirmation of the Attorney General nominee and a report identifying the source of bad pre-war intelligence on Iraq. These are the articles that need to be clicked. Of course, I have no doubt that their click-through numbers were dwarfed by the Britney story.

People should click important news headlines, and bypass the trashy ones, every day, much like some people do on those sites that purport to donate a specified amount of money to a certain charity for each person that clicks on a designated icon. We live in a time (and under the rule of an administration) that values profits above all else. Money talks, and, well, everything else (product safety, national security and our national soul, just to name three things) walks. Let’s turn that idea on its head. If the American people made important news stories more profitable than tales of celebrities and their rehab trips, late night partying, and penchant for appearing in public sans underwear, then the news outlets would give us more news on Iraq and the daily misdeeds of the Bush administration.

Do I think this will ever happen? Of course not. The behavior Bernstein decries is not a passing fad, but rather what the nation has become. The values of American society have shifted. But you have to try, right? For those people who are unhappy with living in a world where Paris, Lindsay and Britney get more scrutiny than George, Dick and Condi, the least you can do is act with your mouse and remote control to send a message.

The story goes that thousands of years ago, while Rome burned, its emperor, Nero, did nothing, other than play his violin. How times have changed. Now, the American empire is burning, our emperor started the fire, and it is the American people who are sitting around doing nothing, only instead of fiddling, they’re playing video games, wasting time on MySpace and reading celebrity news.

That is why it’s not okay to just check and see where Britney has crashed her SUV today, or which bar Lindsay tried to get a drink in (yes, I know Lindsay was in a bar with her friends despite spending a baseball season in rehab, that’s how deeply this crap permeates the national culture). Mindless entertainment has become mindless politics, with calamitous results. Don’t be one of the masses telling the news outlets that it’s okay to cover garbage. As Nancy Reagan once famously said, “Just say no.” Although, I have no illusions that my campaign will be as unsuccessful as hers was.

NOTE: After I posted this article, I clicked on Yahoo!, and saw this headline:

U.S. driving Turkey, Iran together, former U.S. envoy warns

Essentially, the Bush administration's failure to confront the Kurdistan Workers' Party is pushing Turkey towards military action in Iraq, as well as driving our long-time ally away from us and toward Iran.

Stories like this are appearing daily. We live in a time in which we have a president that is making one horrendous decision after another (some "decider," huh?), all while providing attack sound bites with no basis in reality to ward off criticism. Isn't it time we started paying attention?

“The Next Great American Band” Can’t Stand Up to a Great Old One

[NOTE: The following article will also appear as my regular television column for WILDsound.]

In Peter Bogdanovich's epic (four-hour), exhaustive, informative and exhilarating documentary "Runnin' Down a Dream," a comprehensive look at the first 30 years of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Petty makes the observation "Now, they choose rock stars on television," with a sense of disbelief and disgust. The film, which enjoyed a one-day theatrical release on October 15 before being released on DVD, premiered on the Sundance Channel on October 29. Petty's honest and astute observation ran through my head as I watched the first two episodes of Fox's "The Next Great American Band" (8 p.m. Eastern on Fridays).

“American Band” was created by Simon Fuller, the man who brought us "American Idol," but even if he used an alias, there would be no doubt about the pedigree of "American Band." From the lighting, to the graphics, to the format, to the host, to the judges, it could not be more clear that the show is "American Idol" for groups. The first show even showed auditions, just like "Idol" (only, inexplicably, they were held outdoors in a desert near Las Vegas), including a lot of acts chosen just because they were comically awful.

The “Idol” imprint is everywhere. The host of “American Band” is Dominic Bowden, whose only major previous credit is serving as the host of “New Zealand Idol.” Bowden is a loud, clueless, vapid presence, providing nothing aside from annoyance, as well as making me constantly wonder if he looks at himself in a mirror before walking out on stage (everything from his clothing to his hair screams ambitions for a self-consciously, over-styled too-cool-for-school status). He is so off-putting, you’ll find yourself missing Ryan Seacrest, and that, my friends, is no easy task.

The judges, too, are cast straight out of the “Idol” playbook, with Ian “Dicko” Dickson assuming the part of an Australian Simon Cowell, laying harsh truth on the contestants and basking in the boos showered on him by the audience; Goo Goo Dolls lead singer John Rzeznik taking on the Randy Jackson role of the generally easy-going-but-tokenly-critical music industry veteran; and Sheila E., far from her role as drummer and music director for Prince (a fact we are reminded of again and again), sliding into Paula Abdul’s seat as the nurturing female presence, only, thankfully, Sheila E. is far more coherent than Abdul.

The real problem, though, with “American Band” is the bands themselves. I mean, the show is called “The Next Great American Band,” which is a problem when few of the 12 finalists even approach the level of decent, let alone great. As Petty’s quote illustrates, there is something inherently wrong with developing a band through a television program. Truly great bands come from a place of integrity. The Ramones may have barely been able to play their instruments, but their music was genuine and heartfelt, and it showed.

The bands on “American Band,” as a rule, feel prefabricated. In a telling moment from the show’s second episode, during Dicko’s critique of Dot Dot Dot, a co-ed five-piece outfit that resembles, sounds and acts like Fall Out Boy, he noted that the group "looked like an ad executive’s idea of a rock band." He was right, and he could have made the same observation about any number of the night’s performers.

The glitzy approach of “Idol” is actually perfect for the mindless pop singers that the show promotes. But that same corporate attitude fails miserably in the context of bands, certainly ones that are supposed to be great.

The only rock band of the 12 finalists that seems to have any kind of genuine spirit is a Detroit trio called the Muggs, a garage band in the vein of the MC5. That’s not to say that the Muggs are a great group. The lead singer struggles for competence, and while the band is tight, their songs meander. At least the Muggs felt like a real rock band to me, really the only one on the show. Unfortunately, “American Band” would rather concentrate on the fact that the bass player survived a stroke, is now partially paralyzed, and now bangs out the bass lines on a keyboard.

The only other groups that feel at all genuine are the bluegrass outfit Cliff Wagner and the Old #7, the Clark Brothers (think an acoustic country/heritage version of Hanson), and funk rockers Franklin Bridge. These groups, along with the big band consortium Denver and the Mile High Orchestra (who feature one of the least interesting front men of all time), aren’t bad, but they seem like they belong on a different program.

The other seven finalists are all rock bands, and while many of them can play, and many of them are marginally entertaining in their own ways, not one of them has a lick of genuine star quality, and all of them lack originality. Rock music has always borrowed from its predecessors, but too often the competitors on “American Band” feel like they are actors playing the role of bands they would like to be.

Tres Bien, from Clearwater, Florida, slavishly performs 1960s Britpop, but adds nothing at all to the equation. L.A.-based girl band Rocket wants to be the Donnas, but they’re way sloppier and the lead singer can’t sing, which, as you can guess, is a big problem. Sixwire is a Nashville country rock outfit that is so nondescript, they’d fit in great at any southern bar, but they will be hard-pressed to find a wider audience. And Brooklyn’s the Hatch so want to be Maroon 5, I wouldn’t be surprised if the lead singer, in some kind of method acting stupor, makes his bandmates call him Adam (as in Levine, Maroon’s vocalist).

Light of Doom is made up of five 13-year-olds who sound like Iron Maiden if the heavy metal icons were fronted by, well, a 13-year-old who can’t sing. It is annoying and somewhat disturbing to watch a bunch of suburban kids from the San Diego area pretend to be badasses. When both Sheila E. and Dicko told the kids to put their shirts on, they spoke for most viewers, I’m sure.

As bad as Light of Doom is, and as studied as Dot Dot Dot comes off, the award for most prefabricated act has to go to generic rockers The Likes of You (think Nickelback, only wimpier, with extensive use of falsetto), whose lead singer admitted under interrogation by Dicko that the Likes of You was not, in fact, put together as a band. Rather, lead singer Geoff Byrd (whose proud claim to fame is having opened for Hall & Oates, which would have been impressive if it was 1982) put together three musicians to back him for the competition. Of course, he claims they’ve clicked, and now they really are a band. His proof? He proudly claims that the band members are splitting the publishing rights on their songs. It was a moment that crystallized the problem with this show. Do you think Tom Petty sat around his band’s shack in Gainesville, Florida, in 1973 and talked about publishing rights? As Petty points out in “Runnin’ Down a Dream,” after two Heartbreakers records, he still thought publishing referred to sheet music.

“American Band” is a mess, a lazy effort to graft the “Idol” concept onto the vague idea of a band, without the guts to limit the type of music the show is looking for (can’t tee off any demographic groups, now can they?). Pitting a bluegrass band against a heavy metal outfit is pointless. How do you compare them?

But what is even worse is that the groups fail to inspire. These can’t be the best 12 unsigned bands in America. I think even Fuller and Fox would admit that their mission was different, since they were really looking for the combination of 12 bands that would make for good television.

Fuller should stick to picking television-made pop idols. His formula is a better fit for that artificial pursuit than seeking out the next great American band.

Rather than going on a misguided search for the future of music, you are better off looking back at the history of one of the best American bands of all time in “Runnin’ Down a Dream.”

I could write thousands of words on why the documentary does an amazing job of tracking the history of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, a band that has quietly and steadily established itself as one of the most successful and influential groups in modern rock history. But to do so would limit what “Runnin’ Down a Dream” accomplishes.

Even if you’re not a fan of Petty and his band (is that possible?), the film, in a clear-sighted and entertaining fashion, shines a light on how rock bands were developed in the days before reality television. (And later, how the members hang together -- or don’t -- despite adversity.) Watching “Runnin’ Down a Dream” is a primer on why great rock bands were able to emerge in the 1970s, and why there seems to be a dearth of interesting and original bands now.

Between 1974 and 1979, Petty endured the breakup of Mudcrutch (the band that scored his first record deal), the formation of the Heartbreakers, the commercial failure of the first two Heartbreakers albums, and a protracted legal battle with MCA when it purchased Petty's contract from Shelter Records, leading to Petty having to hide the masters of the album he was recording and, later, filing for bankruptcy.

Nowadays, any one of those setbacks likely would have ended Petty’s career, or at least set him back to square one. But the Heartbreakers were nurtured and allowed to develop, so much so that in 1979, the band finally broke through with the classic album “Damn the Torpedoes,” and went on to crank out quality albums and sell out arenas for 25 more years (and counting). Petty and the Heartbreakers spent years honing their abilities and building their chemistry, putting in the hard work and effort to accomplish what they went on to achieve. Compare this to the “American Band” entrants, who are trying to reach fame via a shortcut, looking for a free pass rather than paying their dues.

Petty and the band went on to not only sell tons of records and record a string of now-classic rock songs, but Petty also established personal and musical relationships with a who's who of rock legends, including George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, Del Shannon, Stevie Nicks, Dave Stewart, and Johnny Cash, all while playing a role in the careers of the next generation of artists, like Dave Grohl (who played drums for the Heartbreakers on "Saturday Night Live" before going on to form the Foo Fighters) and Eddie Vedder.

One of the truly amazing things about “Runnin’ Down a Dream” is that it is more than just interviews and cool archival performance footage (although it has both). Rather, nearly everything discussed by the talking heads is also shown in old footage, thanks to the penchant of bass player Ron Blair (and others around the band) to record everything on 8mm film. As a result, virtually nothing chronicled in “Runnin’ Down a Dream” is unaccompanied by matching images. When band members talk about Tench’s car breaking down when the band was heading out to L.A. in 1974, improbably, you get to see it. When Petty discusses how the band was detained in 1977 at a German airport by authorities who thought that they were carrying drugs (they were coming from Amsterdam), even more improbably, you get to watch these naive young rockers waiting to be set free.

I think Fuller should sit down the 12 finalists of "The Next Great American Band" and make them watch “Runnin’ Down a Dream.” Maybe they would learn something. Sadly, I think they wouldn’t get it. Which is why “American Band,” in the end, is uninteresting television.