Saturday Night Live returned with host Dakota Johnson and musical guests the Alabama Shakes after a long absence, and the writers must’ve forgotten they had to write a show. Last night’s episode was generally a cure for laughter. The pre-taped closing sketch should really go down in history as one of SNL’s worst moments. A lot of viewers probably thought the show had wrapped early and their NBC affiliate had already started running some crappy local product.
Fortunately, SNL also stumbled into some distracting controversy with a parody of the Army’s Father/Daughter ad, where a proud dad drops off his kid to begin her life in the military–except this time, she’s being dropped off to join ISIS so she can burn children alive. We guess the controversy is that some people think SNL was equating the Army with ISIS to make some kind of big political point. It’s kind of obvious that nobody at SNL gave much thought to anything this week.
Anyway, the real SNL highlight was the Alabama Shakes getting back to sounding like the complex band they were back in 2011. The past few years have been disappointing, but they were great last night in their second SNL appearance. We’re stuck with this, instead. But you can get that new song by the Alabama Shakes….
