Saturday Night Live got a new boyfriend this weekend, and his name is Jon Hamm. And since it's basically all we care about this morning, let's just skip everything else and get to the get to, shall we?
First things first: WE LOVE YOU, AMY POEHLER! Even though you are officially now off the show, we eagerly await seeing everything you do from now until the end of time. Also: your child is the comedy Messiah, no matter what you say, don't keep him to yourself.
All right, got that off our chest. Moving on.
As for the show itself: we think that NBC has as much invested with the ratings success of Mad Men as AMC now that Jon Hamm has so clearly demonstrated that he can bring the same dashing gravitas to pure idiocy that Alec Baldwin got a second career out of. Whether he was playing a suburban neighbor, JFK, James Mason, or Don Draper himself, Hamm exuded the sort of focused ludicrousness that this show thrives on -- and that must have been a balm to producer Lorne Michaels, who clearly had to reshuffle the show at the last minute to accomodate Poehler's absence and was likely grateful that he didn't have a lemon on his hands. Actually, ha ha, that makes us realize: we fully expect to be reading of Hamm's getting booked for the season finale of 30 Rock now. Can't you just see him as, well, Don Draper, but in 2008 and for laughs, maybe trying to nail Liz Lemon while destroy Jack Donaghy? We sure can. We practically just saw it all over ourselves.
Now, the third major thing to happen on Saturday was the return of yet another cast member to the program. This time, it was Maya Rudolph, playing Michelle Obama in that "Obama Variety Show" bit.
Ok, so, it wasn't the most amazing sketch ever. It had some nice moments but not that many, and in fact, when we first watched SNL on DVR a few hours after air this weekend, we FF'd right through it at first because, well, it just looked like a stinker. Which it's not, actually, it's just not great. But is that enough for our old pal Salon Sarah to ask whether the show's gone "limp"? "In a slump"? Just because the show can't do enough with Maya Rudolph as Michelle Obama?
We're huge fans of Rudolph's, who in films like Idiocracy has proven that she had skills that were never given a proper airing live from New York, but we have a hard time extrapolating anything from her reappearance in this, a week whose production was so clearly reshuffled at the last-minute that Coldplay, the musical guest, appeared four times. (Once more, and we're pretty sure they'd have resorted to playing U2 covers. Zing!) Maybe Rudolph was in some Poehler sketch that got replaced? Heck, let's not forget: Maya Rudolph couldn't get enough decent exposure on the laziest of weeks when she was on staff. Returning in the middle of the most heated political season in decades, on a week when the show's MVP disappears at the last minute? If this were baseball, there'd be a couple asterisks on this episode, so it's hard to hold anything against 'em for not making more of her.
We're not even sure that there's a case to be made that the returns to the show of Rudolph, Tina Fey, Will Ferrell or Chris Parnell prove anything about there being a dearth of good performers, which our wise and esteemed colleague and her wise and esteemed colleagues seem to imply. This ain't Dan Ackroyd coming back to play Bob Dole in a surpriseless incumbent election where Norm MacDonald, the original guy to play Dole, is starting to get squeezed out of the show. There's something historic beginning and ending here -- in the White House, in the electorate, and on the show -- and if this affords former cast members the right to a final victory lap, all the better. (Particularly Ferrell, who as we've noted before, defined something about 43 as astutely as Dana Carvey defined 41.)
In the end, it comes down to this: it's always tempting to say SNL's seen its day, but we gotta say, if "Vincent Price's Halloween Special" is the product of a slump, then give us the slump any day.