Armchair Network Executive

I watch Saturday Night Live more out of habit than any other reason; these days the show is only intermittently funny, but sometimes I want to see a particular musical guest, or see how a guest host does. I was looking forward to this past weekend's show with Daniel Craig as host because I've seen him display a sharp wit in interviews on shows like The Colbert Report, and I suspected he would be game for whatever the writers cooked up.

He was game, but unfortunately the material largely failed him, and there was one sketch that he didn't even appear in. (Why bother even having a guest host, then?) For years SNL has relied far too heavily on sketches that consist of a single joke repeated over and over again, and I suspect this is at least partly due to the challenge of coming up with a show's worth of new material each week. I recognize how difficult it must be to produce this show on such a tight schedule, but I think the overall quality of the show ends up suffering as a result.

The Mrs. is not as much of a TV fan as I am, but after watching this show she made an observation about SNL that I haven't heard anywhere else, but that makes a lot of sense: maybe it's time to stop trying to do the show within the space of one week. Maybe SNL should be on only every other week, which would allow more time to develop sketch ideas and make them as funny as possible.

The network would still end up with about the same number of new shows over the course of the eight-month television season, and NBC could fill in the off weeks with classic episodes that many younger viewers have likely never seen. Just a thought...