Like every episode of “Saturday Night Live” since 1975, Sunday’s three-hour anniversary special was a confusing, celebrity-packed, occasionally funny grab-bag. And we have some thoughts.
Sure, the pop singer took over the summer with her smash hit “Espresso,” but she isn’t a fixture of “Saturday Night Live” like, say, Paul Simon. Simon hosted the second-ever episode of SNL and is close friends with show creator Lorne Michaels. Carpenter is a newly famous pop singer. Yet, there she was alongside Simon, kicking the night off with a wistful duet of “Homeward Bound.” Then Carpenter was a punch line in a “Weekend Update” joke and appeared in a “Domingo” sketch, trying to sing off-key. The Washington Post’s pop music critic Chris Richards
recently wrote: “For the show’s first 30-odd seasons, landing a guest spot confirmed a star musician’s status in the popular imagination. But more recently, the cred balance seems to be seesawing, with pop acts now giving the show necessary injections of cultural legitimacy.”
