SNL Hits A New Low

I realize I'm in the minority (i.e., people who still watch "Saturday Night Live"), and I've come to accept the show's hit-or-miss nature, but Good Golly Miss Molly was this week's episode a stinker!

So much wrong with it I barely know where to begin. Overall, the writing was abysmal, and it didn't help that this week's host, Mad Men's January Jones, was completely incapable of reading a cue card. I lost count of how many times she stumbled over lines and outright screwed up what she was supposed to say. As good as her co-star Jon Hamm was when he hosted the show, she was the exact opposite, from her cue-card screw-ups to her apparent inability to act to her constantly breaking character and laughing. Then again, at least somebody was laughing.

The high points were, as usual, Weekend Update, and the Kathy Lee Gifford Today Show sketch, which served up the whimsical visual of a drunken Gifford getting beaten to a pulp by the Black Eyed Peas. Let's call this the good stuff.

But the bad stuff wasn't just bad, it was amazingly bad. The sketch in which Alfred Hitchock attempts to direct Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly (Jones) in "Rear Window," but has to keep cutting because of Kelly's flatulence, was a perfect example SNL's propensity to latch onto a mildly funny joke and bash it into the ground to the point where not only is it no longer funny, it's actually painful to watch. The skit was, in essence, a five-minute fart joke, with no real point other than the fact that the writers think fart noises are hilarious.

The toilet humour continued with another bit in which a guy continually kept walking in on his roommate sitting on the toilet. If there was a point, it eluded me. And don't even get me started on the "Jon Bovi" backwards band thing, which stopped being funny the third or fourth time they did it, and is now just awful.

This show needs a major revamp or reboot or re-something; otherwise, if this is the best they can come up with, it's really time to pack it in.