Obama and McCain beware: more SNL!
Wednesday, July 23, 2008 at 08:13PM Hand it to the suits at NBC -- they've finally figured out how to capitalize on presidential elections: move the season premier of Saturday Night Live a month earlier.
Normally, the show premiers the first week in October, but this year it'll debut the first week of September. And evidently, they're going to do something they've rarely done before -- four consecutive weeks of live shows leading up to election day.
Even for the shows harshest critics (of which I'm not one), It's hard to argue with SNL's quadrennial brilliance lampooning the presidential candidates. The high-water mark may have been the 2000 election, when Will Ferrell's and Daryl Hammond's spoof of the Bush-Gore debates actually garnered more attention then the debates themselves, and in some ways cemented Al Gore's image as an overbearing nerd. The Gore campaign actually made the vice president watch the segments so that he could see how annoying his stage behavior was.
SNL scored high numbers during the Democratic primary, and Hillary even cited a sympathetic SNL skit during one of her later debates with Obama to drive home the point that the media was unfairly dumping on her.
Lorne Michaels still hasn't revealed who will play Obama and McCain, but my guess is that it'll be Fred Armisen and the ubiqutous Daryl Hammond. Interestingly, the late night comics like Leno and Letterman have struggled with how to deal with Barack Obama, partly because he has no defining characterstics (such as Bush's synatax problems or McCain's age), and partly because they're simply a bit nervous about taking him on. I don't suspect, however, that SNL will have similar reservations; they've always been a bit edgier than the rest of the pack, and I think they'll produce some of the funniest lampooning this election season.
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