Brief thoughts on last night's cameo-tastic episode of "Saturday Night Live" coming up just as soon as I put a lobster on my face...On paper, last night's show sounds like a can't miss: Sarah Palin goes face-to-face with Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin, Mark Wahlberg confronts Andy Samberg about the "Mark Wahlberg talks to animals", and then Palin shows up again on Weekend Update.
Unfortunately, very little of it worked. Palin did little more than show up, and while she gets points for being a good sport, she was stiff in the way that most politicians tend to be on the show (with her running mate a rare exception). (Fair is fair: Amy Poehler doing the Palin rap during Update while Palin raised the roof was the episode's biggest highlight, and Palin raising the roof during it definitely added to the fun.)
The danger in doing these cameo-heavy episodes is that the audience tends to ruin everyone's timing when they have the delayed realization that a Baldwin or a Marky Mark has shown up. Or, in the case of the Wahlberg v. Samberg bit, you could tell that only a handful of people in the audience had seen the original sketch, and their non-reaction to Wahlberg imitating Samberg imitating him sucked all the energy out of things. Ditto the audience not quite getting that it was Oliver Stone in the audience during Josh Brolin's monologue.
(Question: how many hosts in "SNL" history have been as badly upstaged by other guests as Brolin was last night? Not that the show was particularly good, but people are going to talk about Palin and Baldwin and Wahlberg, and most people are barely going to remember that Brolin was on.)
Also, while I loved the lady who loves surprises the first time, that's one of those sketches that shouldn't be turned into a recurring thing, and it didn't work at all last night.
What did everybody else think?
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