Tonight marked the night when actor Seth Rogen dropped by Saturday Night Live for the third time in his career and fans were wondering if he’d be able to get the show kick started after a so-so stretch here in April. While the hosting duties haven’t been terrible in this stretch, they’ve been a little difficult to handle at times and never hit their strides the way they could have.
Thus was the case with Rogen on SNL this week as while he wasn’t a terrible host and the show wasn’t awful, it wasn’t as good as it could have been. It’s been a bad stretch for the show recently and after Anna Kendrick failed to follow up Lena Dunham’s hosting duty with anything to add, there was hope Rogen would at least give us some sort of a win.
But the sketches just only half worked it seemed with the jokes landing but not with the power they could have. As usual, the Weekend Update was the stongest — and longest — part of the show and helped rejuvenate things halfway through.
However, when the Weekend Update is the highlight of the show, you know it’s been suspect week and that was the case. It’s not that the sketches were particularly bad, but they just weren’t that well executed. The best example of this was the sketch in which Cecily Strong played the trailer park sister of Rogen’s character who was getting married. While the premise of Strong telling us how Rogen once had a gay experience in the not so distant past, the jokes just didn’t land and they were delivered in awkward fashion to a silent audience.
Again, it wasn’t that the jokes were flat but something just wasn’t right about the show this week.
It wasn’t the worst episode we’ve seen all season long, as Bruce Willis, Miley Cyrus and Jim Parsons are battling for that title, but our distaste for the episode stemmed more from dissapointment in Rogen and the writing staff than anything else.
Rogen joked at the beginning of the episode that he and the writing staff had no ideas for that week’s show that were funny and didn’t deal with weed, but we had not idea how truthful he was actually being.
Topics: Saturday Night Live, Television
About the Author
Josh Hill
Josh Hill is Editor of FlickSided.com. He has been with Fansided since Novemember 2010 when he joined The Pewter Plank before taking over as Editor at Pippen Ain’t Easy the following month, serving as editor until 2012. He has appeared on ESPN Radio and had work featured on SI.com, FOXSports.com, ESPN.com and CBSSports.com.
Article source: http://fansided.com/2014/04/13/saturday-night-live-review-seth-rogen-funny-snl/