Carrey's name trended on Twitter during Saturday Night Live last night as viewers called for him to be replaced. "Saturday Night Live has a Jim Carrey problem," says Karen Valby. "He gives a bad Joe Biden when the country has never needed a good Joe Biden more. It sounded like a great get at first. Here was a big-time star that could balance out the heft of Alec Baldwin’s Trump. But after three episodes, Carrey still hasn’t managed to break through. Maybe he’s too physical a performer, or too needy a showman, to capture the flapjack earnestness of the former vice president. It makes a person pine for Woody Harrelson and his chew gum dentures. Harrelson managed to imbue his Biden impersonation with both a car salesman’s glint and his own Woody Boyd guilelessness. Meanwhile, Carrey seems stuck doing uncomfortable schtick at half speed. You can almost feel him bristling to push the bit further into some exaggerated insanity, which will only grate worse. He’s a monkey tasked with playing a tortoise." During last night's cold open sending up Trump and Biden's dueling town halls, "the sketch still lost all energy every time we switched back to Carrey," says Valby. "Biden by nature is a tough character to play; his decency, his gaffes, his tendency toward hokum and verbal meandering aren’t juicy Achilles heels to dig around in for sport. But it’s time for either the show or Carrey to pivot."
Kanye West responds to Issa Rae's “Kanye? F him!” joke: "I’ve always said SNL uses black people to hold other black people back. My heart goes out to Issa Rae. I’m praying for her and her family. I know that the twenty years of service that I’ve paid in the entertainment field has furthered our ability to be more successful.”
SNL let NBC off the hook for scheduling its town hall vs. Biden's town hall: "Okay, okay, 'Weekend Update' host Michael Che did make a joke about Saturday Night Live network NBC 'having a type' in enabling Donald Trump to self-program a competing town hall TV event on Thursday opposite Joe Biden’s previously scheduled one," says Dennis Perkins. "(Cue graphic of NBC stars Trump, Bill Cosby, and Matt Lauer.) The COVID-positive Trump bailed on a socially distanced remote second debate, if you recall, with NBC controversially jumping at the chance to play ratings reality competition. Which they—and Trump—lost handily, by the way. But SNL’s requisite cold open about the dueling gabfests began with a crawl claiming parent company’s ratings-grab was actually a “thirst trap” set for Trump, with Kate McKinnon’s acidly polite Savannah Guthrie promising viewers angry at NBC to just wait and see what her 'surprise badass' moderator has in store."
SNL let down Issa Rae with a forgettable episode: "Having an actor host the show and having a comedian host shifts expectations, and opportunities," says Dennis Perkins. "Rae wasn’t provided with many chances to go big, apart from trotting out a decent comical French accent at one point, but grounded her sketches with aplomb. (Sure, she gave the occasional host’s cue card glance, but she’s better at that than Chris Rock was, and Rock was a cast member.) With Rae in the house, however, I couldn’t help but come away thinking about those missed opportunities."