Monday, October 20, 2008
I watched Saturday Night Live last weekend, for the first time in ages, and rediscovered why I don't watch it.
Nobody bothers to learn their lines.
Soap opera people are on every day - they've got seven shows worth of script to learn every week, week after week, and they do it. The SNL folks can't be bothered to learn lines for a 3-minute skit. They read the words off cue cards or a teleprompter. More than half the time it looks like they've never seen those lines before, they're reading it for the first time, and aren't sure where it's going.
It's ugly, because they don't look at the person they're talking to. Not even close.
At the very least, you'd think they could put the cheat sheet close to, over the shoulder of, the other character, so they'd at least be looking in the other character's direction when they're supposed to be talking to them. There's no reason why camera angles couldn't be planned to accommodate that.
Nah. It's like 30 degrees or more off, so they're not even facing them.
I think this shows a huge lack of consideration for the audience, and a lack of pride in the product.
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2 comments:
Don't know about now but there used to be a huge drug culture at SNL. And the writers were so competitive that they'd throw stuff at the actors two minutes before the show opened, just to be sure that their stuff got on.
I stopped watching it 20 years ago. More than that, actually. After the initial cast drifted away, so did I.
I just saw the first season and it looked pretty much thrown together then, too. But when you're 18 and drunk, production values don't mean so much and everything's funny.
The teleprompter reading is very distracting. Actually, I think it's funny when the guests are having to do it, that is part of the fun of it being "a guest". But when the SNL crew is doing it, that is just low quality.
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