On Saturday Night Live

In the course of researching my book, I've had to do some things I'm not proud of. Most of those revolve around watching Hannah Montana. It's no surprise then, that when I forced myself to sit down and watch a complete episode of Saturday Night Live for the first time in a few years, it was because I couldn't ignore Miley Cyrus hosting last weekend.

Positives:

• They did not ignore Cyrus' tiny personal debacles.
• They hit those points hard and early with a nice jazzy song-monologue
• She broke fourth wall in the Bieber sketch and pointed out that salvia is perfectly legal. Good girl.
• The Black Eyed Peas sketch was fairly accurate and all personalities were well portrayed in both attitude and appearance. This is shocking as it included Kenan Thompson in a pretty sizable roll, Thompson being the worst thing on SNL since Jimmy Fallon, assuming you don't count most of the rest of current cast members.
• Cyrus nailed her Fergie impression. Watching her dance like that also clearly shows how much a whore she doesn't dance like in her own shows, poles or not.
• Weekend update had decent writing, Will Forte didn't crack up at any point, Kenan Thompson was completely absent, and lasted a full 20% of the entire episode. (Normally that last part would be a Negative, but by taking up so much time it preempted worse sketches.)

Negatives:

• Every other sketch, really.
• 36 Seasons in and Lorne Michaels still hasn't figured out how to sound check the musical act such that their live performance, pumped through speakers, doesn't sound horrible when played on television.

There's one more thing I was going to list as a Negative, but it might be a positive. Either (more likely) the quality of SNL has degraded so significantly over time that their art department is filled with 2 talentless hacks and an intern who does all the actual work, or (more narcissistically) I've become so awesome at Photoshop and advertising that, without any formal training, I am on par with professional art departments.

Quit biting my style, SNL!
(Or just offer me a job already, geeze.)