Mediacrity
by William Ham
Channel surfers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your remotes! I welcome you to the inauguration of what I hope will be a new bulb in the Lollipop firmament. In this column, I intend to turn you on to sundry facets of the mass-media juggernaut, and in so doing, somehow justify all the time I’ve been spending slack-jawed in front of the goggle box. In addition, I’ll hip you to possible video rentals for the true student of filmic detritus. (Great bad movies, in udder woids.) So let’s get to it.
Saturday Night Life Support: Right now, it seems as if every TV critic in the country is standing outside 30 Rockefeller Center, torches ablaze, crying out for the blood of Lorne Michaels. Saturday Night Live, the consensus has it, should be swiftly put out of its (and our) misery. Well, lemme just say that I am not one of those people. True, of late SNL‘s been about as funny as chlamydia, but there have been several other stretches in its 20-year history of which you could say the same. (How many times have you heard someone say of a current cast member, “He’s no Charles Rocket”?) And in all the anti-SNL rants I’ve heard and read, not one of them has bothered to attempt any constructive criticism. So allow me to take up the slack and outline my seven-point-plan to save Saturday Night Live:
1) Get Mark McKinney out of the second-cop roles and push him to center stage. Better still, purge half the cast Stalin-style and put the rest of the Kids in the Hall in their place.
2) Stop booking sports “personalities” as hosts. And if you insist on doing so, for God’s sake, don’t let them sing.
3) Force Adam Sandler to come up with some new voices for his characters.
4) It’s the ’90s, folks – stop sniggering at gays.
5) To the writers: A lame joke is not made funnier by adding the word “penis” to it.
6) To the next cast member considering a movie career, three words: Cops and Robbersons. Think about it.
7) Come to think of it, mow down the writing staff and put me in there. (Hey, can’t hurt to try.)
So keep these kind suggestions in mind, kids. Merely follow my advice to the letter and there may be hope for this moribund ol’ comedy creature yet. If not, well, I’m sure there are lots of positions available in the NBC mailroom. You’re welcome.
