TTH 5/13/26
SNL Recap
Matt Damon hosted the penultimate episode of season 51, and although the show this week was similar to the way much of the season has gone - amusing at times, nothing all that great, but nothing godawful either - it once again shows how unfortunate it is that this was only Damon’s third time as host. He knows exactly what the assignment requires. He completely surrenders himself to the insanity, and he performs with sufficient skill that the viewer can’t imagine anyone other than him in many of the sketches even if there wasn’t anything specifically Damonesque about the premise.
That is the case with my pick for Best Sketch of the Week, a pre-filmed ad for a brand of kitty litter which promises that the changing colors of the crystals in the litter box indicate the cat’s health. Damon and Ashley portrayed the pet owners who were curious as to what the color blue meant. The omniscient narrator (JAJ) finally admits that blue indicates non-feline urine. That leads them to immediately accuse their moody teenage son (Andrew) of peeing in the cat box. The commercial devolves into scenes from a marriage type emotional trauma, as JAJ provides sadistic commentary. The piece proved once again how the strength of a performance can elevate a sketch.
Damon brought back one of his greatest hits in the cold open. Years ago he made a memorable cameo as Brett Kavanaugh, so it stood to reason that the impression would make a return visit. This week, instead of a Pete Hegseth press briefing, Jost’s Hegseth appeared at a DC bar, where we was joined by fellow (alleged) booze hounds Kavanaugh and Kash Patel (a returning Aziz Ansari.) They of course had specialty drinks ready for them, and when it was time for last call they ordered a whiskey drink, a vodka drink, etc. before their group rendition of Tubthumping led into “live from New York!”
In Damon’s monologue he made reference to the fact that it seems as if he should have hosted more than 3 times by now. After briefly promoting his upcoming Odyssey movie - opening up 9 weeks from now - he also pointed out that this year SNL will not resurrect its occasional Mothers Day tradition of bringing the mothers of cast members on stage. This upset an audience member who was really hoping to meet Marcello’s mom. After Damon recorded a Mothers Day message for anyone who might have neglected to buy a gift for their mother, the camera cut back to the audience, which showed that Marcello’s mom was in the house after all.
The other Mothers Day oriented sketch this week was a trailer for the perfect mom movie. Ashley played the matriarch who was visited by her 3 adult children. The movie contained no drama whatsoever; every plot point in the movie was designed to please her, up to and including the fact that Matt Damon was her husband.
Update was hit and miss this week. Marcello and Mikey donned costumes again, this time as the kamikaze dolphins which the Wall Street Journal claims that Iran has trained to patrol the Strait of Hormuz. Jeremy returned as Tucker Carlson, this week directing his “what are we doing?” outrage towards the Met Gala. The Carlson impression is impeccable, and it’s new enough that we can still find humor in the quality of the impersonation. The writers will need to add some new beats if they plan on keeping Tucker in the rotation, but for now it still hits. Finally, Jane pulled out her keyboard for what may be the last time. There will be more to say when a decision is made on her future, but I admire her strange energy. I don’t find her silly songs funny, but I like the fact that she is different from anyone else in the current cast. I hope SNL continues to allow her to fill the oddball niche that she has established for herself.
One’s enjoyment of the first post-monologue sketch depends on how much you can tolerate spit takes. It was a Godzilla sketch, set in a military complex. Damon portrayed the commander, and when Mikey tells him about the size of the creature, Damon spits a mouthful of coffee in his face. When Sarah is the next to give Damon crucial info, he doesn’t spit in her face, but instead turns once again in Mikey’s direction. This leads to a litany of liquids in Mikey’s face, from a green smoothie, to thick yogurt, to ice cold water from all of his colleagues. There were some nice lines, mostly about the specificity when Damon was requesting drinks, but it was too repetitive for me. It wasn’t inherently funny enough to reach Sideshow Bob stepping on rakes level humor for me.
Much better were the 2 post-Update sketches. Both had just the right amount of 12:30 AM weirdness. In the first, Damon played a high school substitute teacher on his final day with this class. As a goodbye, he pulled out a boom box in the hope that he could start up a dance party with his students. They looked on with horror. In the last sketch Damon & Sarah portrayed a couple in a rocky relationship. The twist is that they were both auctioneers, and they spoke in the rat-a-tat style. Very impressive verbal work from both.
19 episodes down, 1 to go. SNL is bringing out the big guns to bring the season to a close next week. Will Ferrell will host for his 6th time. The musical guest will be Paul McCartney. Expect a cameo-filled episode. The question will be if any longtime cast members announce ahead of time that this will be their final show.
We Live In a Society
The new Netflix adaptation of Lord Of the Flies has been getting good reviews. It might be the most famous example of a story depicting how easily society can crumble without a central authority figure. The reason why it’s such a popular storytelling device is that it’s not much of a stretch to envision such a structural collapse; in real life there are many ways in which we find that smaller scale breakdowns are fairly common. As a case in point in New York there was the great dog poop war this past winter.
The past few winters have been relatively snow free in NYC. It’s been cold, but seemingly every time there was precipitation it coincided with mild temperatures, so there was a lot of rain but little snow. Until this year at least. Suddenly, city residents collectively remembered “oh yeah. That’s what a snowstorm is like.”
The first large snowfall of this past winter was immediately followed by an extended deep freeze, so the snow piles on the curbs stuck around for a while. There were two immediate effects of the onslaught of snow piles which would not melt. After a couple of days there was a preponderance of yellow snow everywhere. It would have been OK if that’s all it was. But it wasn’t. Soon afterwards we suddenly started seeing frozen dog droppings all over the sidewalks. At least I hope it was dog droppings.
It was then that we learned the pooper scooper laws are essentially unenforceable. No one is going to get a ticket unless they are caught in the act, and you would have to assume that no one would be dumb enough to let Fido do his business and not clean up afterwards if they think anyone is watching them. And even though the evidence is left behind it’s not as if there is a database which doggie CSI technicians could use to match DNA. Cleaning up after your pooch is policed with an honors system. It took something as simple as one snowstorm for that honors system to fall by the wayside.
This is more or less a trivial matter. It’s something to keep in mind next time you are watching a movie which has a zombie apocalypse. The line between order and anarchy is a thin one, and it takes very little to snap that line.
50 Years Ago - Captain & Tennille
By 1976 the golden age of the TV variety show was beginning to wind down, but the networks still had enough interest in the format that they were handing out shows as if they were door prizes. Singers of all stripes were given shows, whether they had the proper skill set for it or not. The Captain & Tennille were one of the more consistent hitmakers of the era. Between 1975-1980 they hit the top 10 with 7 different songs, 2 of which were #1 hits. Did that make the duo worthy of hosting their own weekly TV show? ABC executives apparently thought so.
Toni Tennille wasn’t an actress by any means, but she had enough camera presence to at the very least wind up in that Love Boat/Fantasy Island guest starring universe. She had a dynamic and bubbly personality, which was good enough for primetime, but her line reading was fairly stiff. However, she was practically Carol Burnett in comparison to Daryl Dragon. His anti-image was a big part of his persona; he was perfectly content to silently sit at the keyboard as his wife soaked in all of the attention. That doesn’t exactly make for a great comedy team.
In addition, their dynamic didn’t lend itself well to the standard variety show format of the time. Producers loved to follow the Sonny & Cher or Tony Orlando & Dawn model; have the woman in the team hurl snide putdowns at their male partners to bring him down a notch. In this instance, what could Tennille possibly insult the Captain about? Busting his chops would almost feel like punching down. And the Captain insulting Tennille would have been all sorts of icky.
Therefore, it had the usual array of musical performances and broadly written and performed comedy skits, but there wasn’t much substance to the material. I did watch it frequently enough to remember two recurring bits. One was a takeoff on Masterpiece Theater called Masterjoke Theater. Each week a different big name guest star would parody Alastair Cook by introducing the story behind a classic joke, which would then be punctuated with a cream pie to the face. But above all else, this show earned its place in history by introducing America to the Bionic Watermelon. It’s exactly what it sounds like; a damaged watermelon was repaired with bionic parts and it then goes on to fight crime because of course it does. Even 10 year old me could see how absurd it was, but I can’t deny that it was memorable enough to embed its way into my brain. I don’t remember anything I learned in a high school economics course, but I remember the Bionic Watermelon.
This show had solid enough ratings; it helped that it ran during the period when ABC dominated the television landscape so completely that virtually everything the network aired had a huge audience. Despite that, it only ran for 1 season. Putting the show together took too much time away from the Captain & Tennille’s music career, and they wished to devote their full attention to their day jobs. The bottom would soon drop out on the variety show infrastructure anyway, so it’s hard to envision the show lasting much longer than it did even if the stars were fully committed. It’s a minor blip in TV history, but as Rick once told Ilsa, we’ll always have the Bionic Watermelon.
Closing Laughs
You can never be too careful. It might be a Wednesday, but it’s still the 13th. Tread lightly. Have a great day everyone, and thank you for your service. See you all again on Friday.
