What a weepy week it was for comedy nerds. NBC packed a double-whammy of goodbyes, with The Office's poignant series finale last Thursday, followed by Saturday's season finale of Saturday Night Live and final episode to feature Bill Hader, Fred Armisen, and (perhaps) Jason Sudeikis as regular cast members, which was announced only days before. It is indeed the end of an era, not just for the network, but for TV comedy as a whole, and we will talk plenty more about this changing landscape over the coming days, weeks, and months.
Unlike last year's farewell to Kristen Wiig, which had a best-of-Wiig vibe that unfortunately repeated itself a week [...]
New Girl concluded their excellent second season by making one of the world's most awful songs briefly profound.
"Where do we come from? Where do we go?" mumbled Nick Miller in the closing moments of last night's season finale. He was paraphrasing "Cotton Eye Joe," which he justifiably denied enjoying earlier in the episode, betrayed by his involuntary fistpumping. The first question was something that was on the minds of all of the main characters all season long, influencing their decisions as they traversed through the murky, angsty wilderness that is living as a late 20s/early 30s year old with slapstick, pregnant pauses, and a lot of yelling, sometimes [...]
So here we are, waiting to hear if there will be a fifth season of Community, or if last night's "Advanced Introduction to Finality" was the final episode of the series, and not knowing which scenario we prefer.
I don't blame Andy Bobrow, Megan Ganz and the rest of the writing staff, because they were put in an incredibly untenable position when Sony fired Dan Harmon, just like I don't feel any anger towards Moses Port and David Guarascio for trying to pull off a job far more challenging than they ever could have realized. It's possible that it didn't matter who was running the ship this season. [...]
SNL works best when it hits a balance between structure and chaos. As a show that's broadcasted live after only a week of production time, chaos is pre-installed into the system. The show attempts to offset that chaos with as many safety nets as possible: a cast of multitalented actors, a writing staff that can turn out an abundance of material in a pressure-cooker environment, and one of the best crews in television. Over time, some of those safety nets turn into crutches that annoy the hard-core fans: recurring characters, sketches that rely too heavily on celebrity impersonation, talk show formats, etc. So periodically, the show will reintroduce a [...]
In a scathing review published yesterday on Wired, Mat Honan panned iSteve, Funny Or Die’s 80-minute parody biopic of Steve Jobs, calling it “profoundly unfunny… worse in every way than a sidewalk dentist in Bangkok sans anesthesia.” His review is funny in its own right, though not intentionally; reading it, one gets the strong sense that Honan (a tech reporter) is an admirer of Steve Jobs and that part of what bothered him about iSteve was the film's lack of reverence for its subject.
It's a bit unfair to review iSteve as if it were a feature film — it is, and doesn’t pretend to be anything but, a cheap and extended sketch, a cheeky internet experiment. [...]
