You Just Can’t Find Good Partridges Or Pear Trees These Days

SNL Recap

Dana Carvey is never gonna leave, is he? Credit where credit is due, he was one of the stars during one of SNL’s golden eras, so he has an unlimited supply of residue goodwill. But I don’t know what purpose it serves to keep him around now that election season is over. It’s giving off the vibes of that episode of The Simpsons in which Stan Lee refused to leave the comic book store. So, the show brought back Church Chat for the cold open, and the premise is just so tired. Even the studio audience could barely feign enthusiasm. The guests this week were Matt Gaetz (Sarah,) Hunter Biden, and Juan Soto (Marcello.) The performer who portrayed Hunter Biden? David Spade. I’m not going to pretend that Spade was one of my favorite cast members, but I get the desire to bring back as many alumni as possible in this anniversary season. Still, if you’re going to bring back someone who has a distinctive persona, use that. Spade’s Biden came with none of his signature snark. Why bother?

Paul Mescal, an actor who is not well known for comedy, hosted this week. He addressed that in the monologue, showing a brief montage of crying scenes in his movies. He was certainly no disaster - even if he was one of the most blatant cue card readers in memory - but boy, was the material scattershot this week. Even the sketches that started out well fizzled quickly. I’m trying to be generous, but this was yet another complete dud of an episode.

Pickings were slim, but I’ll go with the lawyer sketch as my choice as Top Sketch Of the Week. Andrew played an attorney defending Mescal’s accused thief. The fact that he had his client dressed up as if he were a member of Devo signaled that there would be a visual gag to come, but I admired Andrew’s commitment to the bit.

The most characteristic bit of the episode in that the concept was OK, but the execution was poor, came with the first post-monologue sketch. Mescal portrayed a college freshman back home for his first visit and when he removes his hat his parents (Heidi and Emil) were horrified to see that he had a stud in his ear and overreacted wildly, including tossing grandma through the window. Twice! This is a role firmly in Heidi’s wheelhouse, which at the same time is part of the problem. As good as she is, she has been going to that same well too often. See also her Update appearance in which she portrayed the mother of a new NFL star.

Similar to the above piece, most of the material consisted of pieces that either went nowhere or went on to repeat the same joke for much too long. Such as the Spotify Wrapped bit. A group of friends were playfully mocking each other’s lists, until Mescal revealed one of his top artists as an odd, obscure, atonal musician who was another entry in the litany of Bowen’s odd characters. Or the Swashbucklers sketch, in which a bachelorette party spends a night out at a pirate themed strip show in which the performers act out an elaborate production but don’t do any actual stripping. And the red carpet sketch for the Complete Unknown movie? It gave Chloe another chance to show off her Chalamet impression, along with JAJ as Bob Dylan, Andrew as Bruce Springsteen, and Mescal as a particularly self-righteous Bono. (I’m torn about their rankings of Rory Gilmore’s boyfriends. I agree that Jess is the obvious #1, but as bland as Dean was, Logan was just a bit too punchable as far as I’m concerned.)

Even the pre-filmed pieces this week were lacking. There was a trailer for an expanded edition of Gladiator II, this one with 50 minutes of songs added to capitalize on the success of Wicked and Moana 2. The Please Don’t Destroy video was one of their lesser efforts; Mescal bonded with the trio to the extent that they moved to a cabin together where he raised them like sons.

If the episode has an honorable mention it goes to the restaurant ad sketch which is further solidifying Ashley’s position as the most promising of this year’s newbies. She and Mescal starred in an ad for an Italian restaurant chain, and her inadvertent line flub turned out to be a pun “pastabilities” that the director liked. This sent Mescal’s more experienced co-star into a tizzy, attempting to come up with his own catch phrases - “spaghetti or not, I am going to kill you.” Unfortunately, Kenan’s bizarre appearance at the end as the restaurant owner brought the piece to a screeching halt.

As for my choice as Employee Of the Week? The episode was a great showcase for Heidi, but ultimately she was a little too much in Full Heidi Mode. So, I will give it To Andrew for the lawyer sketch. Next week Chris Rock will host for his fourth time. Let the speculation of how many fellow alumni will appear commence.

The Ballot Countdown

Newcomer #10 Ben Zobrist - I kinda hate to rank Ben Zobrist this low, he is one of the avatars for a type of player that has grown increasingly valuable in the current era. In addition he will always hold a special place in history for winning the 2016 World Series MVP award while with the Cubs. It’s a little known historical fact that that series broke a championship drought that had lasted for more than a century for that franchise.

As roster construction has changed, more relievers on a team has resulted in shortened benches. Which means that there is a premium on positional versatility; if a guy is capable of playing multiple positions - and playing them well - he is one of the most crucial players on the roster. Zobrist was largely a second baseman, but he could play anywhere on the field and he acquitted himself well wherever he was placed. Add an above average bat to that and you have a player who received MVP votes in 3 separate seasons.

During his 6 year peak, he averaged over 6 bWAR per season, even leading the AL in that metric once. One can argue about the accuracy of WAR as a statistic, but it’s hard to dispute that his emergence as a regular player coincided with Tampa Bay finally rising from the depths and establishing themselves as a contending franchise. His career numbers don’t jump off the page, largely due to the fact that he did not receive regular playing time until his age 28 season. Perhaps if the Rays had recognized what they had sooner, Zobrist could have had a stronger case, but he is not a HOF worthy player. No matter, that pennant flying at Wrigley Field is what matters most.

Holdover #10 Torii Hunter - Timing is sooooo important. Jim Edmonds and Kenny Lofton were each significantly better players than Torii Hunter was. And yet, they were both one and done on the ballot. They unfortunately debuted on the ballot when it was so stacked that it was impossible for voters to narrow it down to only 10 choices. The ballot is much lighter now, so Hunter does not have the competition that Edmonds and Lofton. (I’m not necessarily saying that I believe either of them are Hall of Famers, but they were good enough that they deserved more time on the ballot so that their cases can be heard.)

Hunter played for 19 seasons, and was a consistently productive hitter, even though he never managed to lead the league in a single category. Most of his value came on defense; he won 9 Gold Glove awards. It’s worth noting that it was not until the very end of his career when these awards went to separate left, center, and right fielders instead of going to 3 outfielders, regardless of which position they played. How many would he have won had he been solely competing against other center fielders? Probably not all 9.

I don’t want to sound as if I am completely writing him off; that offense/defense combo made for a valuable player, especially taking into account that he remained a productive hitter well into his mid-thirties. But that’s not quite HOF caliber; I said that he was not as good as Edmonds or Lofton. Instead I would rank him somewhere close to a guy like Steve Finley. Very good, sometime great, but rarely elite enough to warrant Hall consideration.

Remember This?

Like most of you, when I was a kid this is the time of year when I parked myself in front of TV eagerly anticipating the ads for this year’s hottest Christmas toys. Check that, I would have done this a month ago. By this date I had already submitted my Christmas list and was fully into the waiting impatiently phase. I was still naive enough to be unaware of how cheaply made and poorly constructed many of these toys would prove to be. The most blatant examples of shoddy work were the action figures that Hasbro produced; they were held together by one string. As early as December 27 my brand new Mr. Spock would inevitably lose an arm.

And then there were the ones that never worked as well as the commercials would lead you to believe. How many of you had the K-Tel E-Z Tracer?

The ad made this look so enticing and simple to use. I could replicate my favorite comic book? Shut up and take my money! Or at least, my parent’s money. The reality of the gadget was something entirely different. First off, you needed a pretty big surface for it to work properly, so unless you had a large kitchen table you were out of luck. More importantly, it involved a system of levers and weights. It was pretty damn complex for a child, so it was almost impossible to produce an accurate recreation of what you are attempting to trace. Nothing that I tried came close to the original; I’m pretty sure I had pushed it into the back of the closet as early as mid January. Curse you, Madison Avenue, you fooled me yet again!

Non-Peak TV - The TV Movies (Part 2)

Makers of television films loved to produce Cautionary Tales. Those were the stories that were just a bit too racy or mature to serve as an Afterschool Special, so they needed to be saved for prime time. A perfect example was Diary Of a Teenage Hitchhiker. This one starred Charlene Tilton as the titular hitchhiker, who ignored all warnings of the inherent danger, even though there was a serial rapist preying on young female hikers.

A close relative of this trope was the murder movie, and once again the victims of the mad killer were often young women. One such movie was Death Scream, based on the infamous Kitty Genovese murder. I remembered that it had an all-star cast, and when I searched for it I was amazed by some of the names in the movie. Ed Asner! Art Carney! Cloris Leachman! Tina Louise! Diahann Carroll! Kate Jackson! Raul Julia! Lucie Arnaz!

And then there was the Citizen Kane of made for TV movies, Death Car On the Freeway. In this classic the serial killer was a dude in a van who targeted young women driving alone. Starring Shelley Hack, I never actually watched this movie all the way through, but I stumbled across one of the kill scenes whilst channel surfing, and my gosh it was deranged. I couldn’t find the scene by itself, but it is included as part of this montage. It’s the one where he somehow attaches his van’s hitch to the car of his victim. It ends with an explosion, because of course it does.

Some of these movies have been so memorable that they have remained entrenched in my brain for decades. I’ll close with these 2 in particular, because both starred the man who must be considered the John Cazale Of the Made For Television Movie, in that every one that he made was a stone cold classic. That would be James Brolin. He was part of the ensemble of Short Walk To Daylight, a low budget take on the disaster movie. He was one of a group of passengers riding the subway late at night just as an earthquake strikes New York City. They must find their way through the tunnels up to the surface. It included a prime example of the Chekhov’s Gun Principle. The moment that a train conductor warned everyone not to step on the third rail you knew it was only a matter of time until one of the passengers would meet their doom by touching the rail. Bonus points for making sure that the hippy character would be the one to make that fatal error. Why do you think they call it dope, anyway?

Did Brolin need co-stars? No sir. He could carry a movie in which he shared almost all of his scenes with animals. He starred in Trapped. In this movie he was a shopper in a department store who was mugged in the men’s room shortly before closing time. He was unconscious in a bathroom stall as the store closed; don’t stop to wonder why security did not do a final check before shutting the store down and letting the guard dogs loose in the store. When Brolin came to he quickly found that he was trapped overnight in the store where he had to fight off a pack of Dobermans in order to stay alive.

You almost never see made for TV movies on network television these days. That is the realm of Lifetime or Hallmark. Young people have no idea what they are missing out on.

Closing Laughs

That will do it for now. Thanks as always for tuning in, and I will see you all again on Friday.