SNL Comes Up Lame This Primary

There was a time when Saturday Night Live could have had great fun with Mitt Romney's proclamation that he "liked to fire people." Instead we got this week's bland cold open (see video) in which Romney tried to (ha ha) fire his breakfast. "It's been that kind of year on Saturday Night Live," writes Kera Bolonik at Salon. "The Republican presidential field is an embarrassment of crazy-train riches. But the writers have been lazily broad-stroking caricatures."

As recently as 2008, Tina Fey proved that SNL could still be a home for edgy satire that shaped the national conversation. But today's writing is lame, and the impressions dull—particularly Jason Sudeikis' toothless Romney and Fred Armisen's "dreadfully boring" President Obama. "SNL is failing viewers right now, by resting on those laurels of 2008," Bolonik writes. "If these writers had a hard time making the present cast of GOP characters interesting," the 10-month Romney vs. Obama race will be excruciating. Full column here. (More Saturday Night Live stories.)