'SNL' at 32: Cutting Edge Yields to Comfy Middle

Brian Williams, anchor of "NBC Nightly News," won the Good Sport of the Week award over the weekend by spoofing himself, and anchordom generally, on the 32nd season premiere of "Saturday Night Live."

Tina Fey, co-anchor with Amy Poehler of the show's popular "Weekend Update" segment, has left "SNL" for prime time (a new comedy called "30 Rock"), so fellow cast member Seth Meyers is replacing her. But in a brief pre-"Update" sketch, Williams sat next to Poehler at the desk and told her, "I'm so excited to be doing 'Update' with you. . . . I've written a ton of material."

Poehler had to give Williams the bad news that he wasn't wanted, and Williams amusingly feigned injury to his ego, saying with mock petulance that he was going home to tell his wife and two children "that Daddy's not going to be on TV tonight."

It was a lackluster enough show that this little moment was arguably its hilarity high point, but then expecting the 32nd season premiere of any weekly TV show to be a revolutionary riot is patently unfair. And Executive Producer Lorne Michaels, working under the handicap of a reduced budget (because NBC prime time is doing so miserably), had to pare the cast down to 11 regulars and zero featured players, saying goodbye to such lovable stalwarts as Horatio Sanz.

And of those regulars, alas, there is no one who stands out strikingly from the crowd, impish and spirited and versatile, the way, say, a Will Ferrell did in the past. Darrell Hammond, the great impressionist, continues to amaze with his on-target imitation of Bill Clinton, but he's done it seemingly dozens of times. (Mercifully, Hammond escaped the purge, perhaps because he constitutes a cast of about 20 people all by himself.)

Some of the returning players are still depressingly anonymous: Bill Hader, Jason Sudeikis, Will Forte -- are these household names in any American households but their own? Meyers took over the "Update" co-anchoring with competence and affability but no particular sparkle.

All the surrounding blandness puts a heavy burden on Poehler, who has become the show's Great Blond Hope and its single most valuable performer, if partly by default. In addition to "Update," she appeared as Farrah Fawcett in another sketch.

Kristen Wiig, who at least seems new, is a model of self-assurance and very adept at handling the classy lady roles, but her range has so far not been demonstrated. Maya Rudolph was a star player, Poehler's sister in comic dominance, on Saturday's show, playing a prim and repressed Condoleezza Rice to Hammond's flawless Clinton and, later, doing a hilarious impression of Whitney Houston in a spoof of the Geico celebrity-and-real-person commercials.

Andy Samberg played the real person in the spot, seen in the show's last half hour, and though Samberg has yet to explode on the show, he seems one of the most potentially explosive performers. He has a great face for comedy, almost instantly iconic, but was able to maintain composure while Rudolph twirled up a storm next to him.

Samberg had a breakthrough last season when one of the sketches in which he appeared became a huge hit on the Internet after it aired on the show. Indeed, the blasted Internet seems to have affected "Saturday Night Live" as it has affected so many other institutions in American culture. During a commercial break, viewers were told they could see "the season premiere of 'Saturday Night Live' " -- even though that's what they were watching -- later on "NBC.com."

Perhaps the show's currency and comic credentials will be enhanced when each show is pared down to highlights and those moments are recirculated on the Web. America has bought into the myth that anything on the Internet is coming to them via some kind of alternative medium not controlled by America's corporate giants, which of course is a joke in itself -- as is the acceptance of often amateurish and dubiously authoritative "blogs" as the new undisputed truth.

We are turned upside down and inside out by this still-growing monster in our midst and obviously going through a period of adjustment -- during which television and the Internet move closer to becoming mutually symbiotic. Dane Cook, the lowbrow comic who hosted the "SNL" season premiere, has the Internet to thank for a huge spurt in his own popularity after years as an unknown. He has said that he used blogging and e-mailing to reach new fans, mostly young ones.

"SNL's" season premiere went very easy on George W. Bush, played in the "cold open" sketch by Will Forte. The joke in the weak sketch was that Bush is so unpopular in his own party that he was even unwelcome at a celebration held to commemorate the reelection of the state comptroller in South Carolina. Bush sat on the dais but couldn't manage to horn his way into the action.

Other sketches tended to turn up the volume as a compensation for lackluster comedy writing. But generally speaking, the first show of the season is never the best for "Saturday Night Live." As expected, it returned with new graphics (big, bold type) and a new opening montage of New York at night. There probably hasn't been a season when "SNL" didn't look terrific -- and exhibit incredibly smooth production for a live show.

Compared with its earliest years -- and sentimental baby boomers still have a habit of doing that -- "Saturday Night Live" may seem bland, but compared with most of the other satirical humor on television, and most other comedy on television generally, it remains a sensational maverick, even in middle age.