It’s kind of a miracle but 44 years after its debut, Saturday Night Live is still going strong and even more essential to the national psyche than it’s ever been.
At a troubled time, when Americans are at each other’s throats, SNL somehow manages to thread the needle and deliver sharp social commentary that might offend the most extreme and humorless partisans across the spectrum but gives the majority of the country — from center-right to center-left — something to laugh about.
Television is awash in so-called satire, but most of the other late night comedy shows — from Colbert to Kimmel to Trevor Noah — have become so bitterly anti-Trump that the sketches are little more than rants, applauded by those who agree with their politics and written off by everyone else.
By contrast, when an SNL skit goes viral, it’s usually subtle enough that both sides can get the joke – and maybe even concede that the other side has a tiny point too. Whether by luck or design, the show has managed to stay front and center of the national conversation since the beginning of its new season in September.
Consider these examples.
The most important comedy moment of the year was the cold open of the very first episode of the season. Coming on the heels of the wrenching Supreme Court hearing, at a time when it seemed we might never laugh again, Matt Damon made a surprise appearance as Judge Brett Kavanaugh and nailed the essential absurdity of those proceedings. From the constant invocation of his friend “Squee” to the refrain “I like beer,” Damon was all-in as the aggressively put-upon Kavanaugh. And everyone did laugh again – at least those who don’t think politics is a matter of life and death.
The second-most important TV moment of the year was Pete Davidson’s apology to GOP Congressional candidate and Afghan war veteran Ben Crenshaw, whose physical appearance – including an eyepatch – he’d mocked the previous week. Crenshaw had lost an eye in combat, but he graciously accepted Davidson’s apology and appeared on “Weekend Update” to make a few mild jokes and plead for Americans to both forgive each other and to remember war veterans and the heroes of September 11, including Davidson’s own firefighter father, who died in the World Trade Center. If I were king of the universe I would make every American watch that clip at least five times.
In a way this is Davidson’s season, even though he hasn’t appeared in a lot of sketches. He entered the season engaged to pop star Arianna Grande, which occasioned a lot of jokes. And then they broke up, which wasn’t funny, but did generate a huge amount of media attention.
Or maybe it’s Kate McKinnon’s season, whose impersonations of a rapping, break-dancing Ruth Bader Ginsburg have been an Internet sensation.
Speaking of media attention, in that first episode of the season, Kanye West appeared as a musical guest wearing a MAGA hat, then lectured the audience at the episode’s conclusion about President Trump’s merits. As if that wasn’t weird enough, the rap star then visited Trump in the Oval Office, ostensibly to talk about prison reform, but really to monologue about all the ideas percolating in Kanye World. The media ate this up too. Needless to say, SNL then did hilarious a sketch about the Trump/Kanye meeting. Sometimes with SNL, it’s hard to tell where the parody begins and ends.
Saturday Night Live also managed to stay in the news for reasons that had nothing to do with the new season. When actor Alec Baldwin was arrested – bizarrely – for an altercation over a parking space in Greenwich Village, he was widely identified with his impersonation of Trump on SNL. Baldwin’s been a movie and TV star for thirty years but his main identification in the public mind now is with SNL.
SNL is also the subject of a pivotal scene in the hugely popular “A Star is Born.” When the movie-makers want to demonstrate that Lady Gaga’s character, Ally, has sold out her musical roots, they have her appear as a flashy lip-synching performer on the late night show. This is another case of art imitating life, because Lady Gaga herself has appeared on SNL (as herself) a number of times.
Given the show’s notoriety, the ratings have been stronger than usually this year. All this is a bit surprising because the cast for the past few years has not really been that strong, with only McKinnon and long-time cast member Kennan Thompson consistently providing the zaniness of the best SNL ensembles.
All this goes to show is that SNL has become bigger than any single cast member. When it keeps its eye on the ball and remembers that its job is to produce a mainstream comedy show it can keep the laughs coming and the viewers tuned in.
We live in anxious times, although it will take a thousand social scientists to explain why that’s the case at a time of relative peace, general prosperity, and mostly miraculous medical care.
You would think that the television, once derided as a national narcotic and a place where couch potatoes go to veg out, would provide an escape from anxiety, but it doesn’t. And I’m not just talking about the content of television programming, which itself leans to the alarming.
No, what I find anxiety-inducing on TV is the 21st Century phenomenon called “Fear Of Missing Out” or FOMO. There’s just too much television to watch or even keep straight. This leads to the sense that we’re missing out on interesting television content that other people are enjoying. This feeling is only exacerbated by the many podcasts, blogs, websites and Twitter accounts dedicated to helping us navigate through the best of TV. They’re always marveling at shows we’ve barely heard of.
It seems like a lifetime distant, but just ten years ago a reasonably alert person could keep a list of all the great TV shows to watch in his head. Not so today. As TV content has expanded exponentially there are must-see TV shows hidden all over the TV spectrum, if I can only remember what they are or where thye’re located. Unless I literally write them down on a list I keep on my phone, I never think about them again – until the NEXT time someone mentions them.
In this regard, the streaming services are singularly unhelpful. Netflix in particular does not believe in advertising its shows – indeed there are so many of them that it would be impractical. (Although I did read in the Wall Street Journal that Netflix does post a lot of billboards in Los Angeles to mollify its stars.)
Instead of traditional advertising or marketing, Netflix makes you aware of new content by prominently placing on your welcoming screen the shows its algorithm thinks you want to see.
First of all, I don’t have that much faith in these “if you like this, you might like that” algorithms. They are nowhere near as sophisticated as they seem. But more important, there’s such a gush of new content that you’re likely to miss a fantastic new series if you don’t log on for a couple of days and they’ve moved on to promoting something else.
Counterintuitively, our TV-related anxiety is rising even as it’s easier to watch TV any time, any place. Given the rise of time-shifting and multiple video platforms, there’s no reason to ever miss a program. In the pre-DVR age, if you skipped an episode of your favorite show, that was it – it disappeared into the broadcast ether and you’d never see it unless you were lucky enough to catch it on reruns or wait several years for syndication.
Yet the truth is, if you missed an episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” or “All in the Family,” you didn’t really care that much. All the episodes were more or less interchangeable. Since there was no narrative arc over the series, you weren’t being deprived of important plot developments if you had better things to do Saturday night than to sit around watching TV. In other words, because TV was just entertainment and not “art,” you didn’t need to sweat seeing every episode.
A related challenge for watching TV these days is too much choice. People think they want a lot of options but they don’t really. There’s nothing quite a paralyzing as going into an ice cream story with 60 flavors and trying to pick the one that will give you the richest, most sensational ice cream experience. Same with TV. When I look at all the shows on Netflix, they all seem pretty good but I worry that I’ll be wasting my precious TV-consuming time by not watching the very highest-quality show. We’d be better off with fewer shows and more obviously terrific ones.
Needless to say, my complaint falls under the category of “first world problems.” With all the despair in the world, am I really going to feel sorry for myself because I feel overwhelmed by the TV landscape? Uh. Yeah. Maybe it doesn’t rise to the level of justified anxiety, like fear of losing a job or getting a disease, but there’s no question that whenever my wife and I sit down to watch TV at night, I feel a sense of pressure to pick the “right” show for us to watch. Life is too short to waste on “only OK” television.
What I really need is an app to help me find and remember content regardless of whether it’s broadcast, cable, or streaming. Can someone invent that and give me some piece of mind?
If you had told me last March that this would be the greatest Red Sox team of all time I would have been incredulous. THAT grab-bag of high-priced, under-performing free agents, younthful home-grown talent, and journeyman cast-offs with the miserable bullpen? Sure, they had won the division the previous two years but quickly folded in the glare of the play-offs.
And yet here we are, with pundits arguing not just whether this is the greatest Red Sox team ever but where it ranks as the greatest baseball team of all time. (The consensus seems to be that since expansion in 1961, they are second only to the 1998 Yankees — see FiveThirtyEight’s analysis here.) I’ll leave it to the historians to properly place them — at the moment I am more interested in how we got where we are. Here are 16 thoughts and observations.
1.It took me a long time to warm up to this team. For nearly a decade the Patriots — not the Sox — have been the team of sustained excellence and a lot of my emotional energy went there. But more important, there was no one on the team that I really loved, the way I once loved Yaz, Fred Lynn, Nomar, Pedro, or Big Papi. If I had a favorite player in 2018, it was Dustin Pedroia, who’s connected back to the 2007 World Champions but was injured most of the year and barely played. The next longest-serving player was Brock Holt — a dirt dog for whom I do have a lot of affection, but hardly the player to anchor your undying loyalty to a team. To really love a professional athlete, he needs to have delivered for you in numerous high pressure situations, so it’s likely that I will come to love Mookie Betts or Andrew Benintendi in the years ahead based on this season alone.
2. One thing I hate in sports — as in real life — is second-guessing. That was on display in Game One of the season, back on March 29, when the Red Sox blew a 4-0 lead to the Tampa Bay Ray. The Boston media were ballistic that the new manager — that idiot Alex Cora — had not brought in closer Craig Kimbrel in the eighth inning to get a six-out save, but had instead called on that other idiot Joe Kelly, who promptly coughed up the lead and blew the game. The vitriol was barely lessened when Cora explained that Kimbrel was not yet in mid-season shape yet because he’d been attending to the numerous heart operations his daughter was undergoing back in Boston. And besides, he argued, why should he be managing the first game of the season like it’s the play-offs anyway. This didn’t assuage his critics. It took a winning streak to do that.
Joe Kelly — from the goat of the season’s first game to World Series hero
3. Probably the key development of the season is unremarked on now — the release of former superstar Hanley Ramirez in May. Ramirez was a former high-impact player making over $20 million when the Sox cut him loose. He was playing fine, but was not going to be a playing full-time, and Cora decided that he would be disgruntled sitting on the bench. Baseball teams, like most organizations, hate to admit mistakes and cut their losses but they did swallow Ramirez’s salary to avoid clubhouse discontent. And releasing Ramirez gave them room to sign World Series hero Steve Pearce a few months later.
4. Baseball teams always talk about the importance of “character” and the Ramirez release showed that the Red Sox really meant it. Ramirez wasn’t a bad guy but he had a history of being selfish and moody. That is NOT what the Red Sox wanted this year. Cora wanted players who would sit on the bench and like it if they were told it could help the team. He also wanted players who were willing to do things outside their comfort zone, like pitch in relief if he needed that. In other words, he wanted players like the modern Patriots and Celtics.
5. Although the team roared back from that Game One loss and went on an early winning streak, I didn’t become a true believer until the summer. They really were winning a lot and, more important, they were coming from behind — the sign of a team that doesn’t give up — one of the definitions of “character.” They were fun to watch because you never knew what would happen.
6. What also made them a joy to watch was that they played “the right way.” The latest analytics-driven fad has teams trying to hit a lot of home runs, which also means striking out a lot. And sure enough the Yankees hit more homers this year than any other Yankee team (and that’s saying a lot.) But they didn’t score the most runs in the league. That would be the Red Sox, who hit to the opposite field, took the extra base, stole bases when they could and had tremendous plate discipline. They would annihilate other teams by stringing together hits, walks, long at-bats and the occasional soul-crushing home run.
7. The summer fun was darkened by the absence of beloved broadcaster Jerry Remy, however. Remy has deep roots in New England, growing up in Somerset Mass and playing on the ill-fated 1978 Sox. Remy is the best color commentator in baseball (in all of sports, as far as I’m concerned) and he’s a lot of fun in the booth. But he’s had a tough few years, with various bouts of cancer. The illness returned this year and he was gone most of the season for treatment. I really missed him. He would have loved calling the the rest of the games for this team.
We missed the RemDog this summer
8. As much we love it when the Sox make it into the play-offs, it’s exhausting and murderous for the fans. There’s nothing in sports as stressful as post-season baseball. The Red Sox played 15 high-pressure games against the three other toughest teams in the sport (The Yankees, Astros and Dodgers.) In football it takes four months to play 15 games and the Sox had to do it in fewer than four weeks. And the pressure during a game usually builds and builds to the last out because the tying run is almost always just a few batters away. During the regular season, the time it takes to throw a pitch can be boring but in the post season, the long intervals between pitches is just heightened tension, with no let-up.
9. For all the criticism that social media gets for ruining the 21st Century, I have to admit that it was my loyal friend during the play-offs. I watched most of these games alone, with my phone open to the running commentary on Twitter (and to a lesser extent, Facebook). It was a little like being in a sports bar, with people saying a variety of inane, funny and smart things.
Thanks to Twitter for tipping me off to this funny juxtaposition of Andrew Benintendi and Mikhail Baryshnikov
10. The length of the games combined with the late starts is a crime against humanity. Hasn’t it been proven time and again that sleep-deprivation causes a myriad of health problems? And yet we are expected to stay up past midnight night after night. So many ads! So many foul balls and pitching changes! And the new thing this year — fear of sign-stealing, resulting in multiple signs by the catcher, leading to the pitcher staring in for minutes on end trying to figure out what to throw. And even when you do get to bed it’s impossible to sleep with all that adrenaline coursing through your veins.
11. Speaking of which, that 18-inning game was the worst killer of all time! I gave up at 2:30 a.m. when it became apparent that the Sox would not win, having used up all the most productive players as pinch-hitters and pinch-runners. Poor Ian Kinsler almost ended up as the 21st Century’s Bill Buckner when he inexplicably threw the ball away with two out in the 13th and the Sox up by a run. Years from now — if we leave that long! — we will brag that we survived that game, but I am only now returning to normal.
12. Steve Pearce was named series MVP — and why not? He hit some crucial home runs. But the unsung MVP was Nathan Eovaldi, the losing pitcher from Game Three, who hung in there as a reliever, tossing 97 pitches through the 18th inning in a Sisyphean effort, knowing he had to pitch until the end of the game because the bullpen was depleted. Having relieved in both Games One and Two he was putting his arm at risk with every pitch but was throwing over a hundred miles an hour until the end. This potential sacrifice moved fellow pitcher Rick Porcello to tears and inspired the rest of the team not to be disheartened by what could have been a demoralizing loss. In a quick team meeting after the game, Alex Cora singled out Eovaldi’s effort and his teammates gave him a rousing standing ovation and vowed to avenge his loss.
13. Now that the Dodgers have safely lost, we can be grateful that we had a super-villain to root against — Manny Machado. This is the guy who spiked and injured Dustin Pedroia’s ankle, who stepped on Pearce’s foot at first base, twice hit catcher Christian Vasquez in the head with his bat, and failed to run hard on a ball he thought was a homer and ended up a single I am sooo glad that guy is on the losing side and actually struck out to end the final game. (Here’s a seriously incomplete compilation of his various sins against good sportsmanship.)
14. I am not a fan of “bullpenning,” the practice of pulling a starter early and turning the game over to the relievers. Supposedly this is another analytics-driven strategy, but for it to succeed you need a bullpen full of great pitchers. If you put in four relievers and even one of them has a bad day, then you’ve blown the game. This strategy bit Dodgers manager Dave Roberts in the ass a couple of times, most notoriously in Game Four, when he removed the cruising Rich Hill in favor of some guys who coughed up the lead. President Trump, the Second-Guesser-in-Chief even tweeted about it. But let’s remember that later in the same game Alex Cora was blistered for leaving his own started Edgar Rodriquez in TOO long. So you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
15. I know that David Price came up big and had a big redemption story but I still don’t really like the guy. He never apologized for dissing Dennis Eckersley, and immediately after winning the World Series he met with the media and basically pulled a Nixonian “You won’t have me to kick around any more.” The actually quote was: “I can’t tell you how good it feels to hold that trump card. And you guys have had it for a long time. You’ve played that card extremely well. But you don’t have it anymore — none of you do — and that feels really good.” Talk about being a sore winner.
David Price, trump-holder
16. Perhaps the best thing about the Red Sox in the post-season was that almost everyone contributed in a major way. The bench players — the guys who aren’t stars — had a bigger impact on the game than the big-name stars. The much-maligned reliever Joe Kelly pitching great; the low-hitting Christan Vasquez stroking a double to the opposite field; journeyman Brock Holt hitting for the cycle. All this was a important reminder that baseball is a team sport. Boys and girls, watch how they played and try to live your life like that!!
Can the greatest team in Red Sox history repeat? I’m not counting on it. Not because I lack faith in our young stars — Betts, Benintendi, Bradley, Bogearts, Devers, etc — or our established veterans — Martinez, Sale and Price — but because everything has to got exactly right to win a sports championship. The players need to stay healthy, they all need to have good years at the same time, and they need to get hot when you need it most. The Sox rampaged through the post-season but I don’t think it was because they were that much better than the Yankees, Astros or Dodgers. It was a mix of talent, character and primarily luck.
That’s really the wrong question to ask anyway. Next year is a year away. Let’s live in the moment and celebrate a great season. There’s a lot of misery in life so it’s important to savor the happy times as long as possible.
Really!!? 