Saturday Night Live

Sabrina Carpenter, who will for the first time this week be hosting NBC’s Saturday Night Live, continues to be a cause of controversy. Over the summer, the five-foot, honey-voiced singer revealed the cover for her newly released album, Man’s Best Friend. It shows her wearing a black minidress on her hands and knees, while a faceless man holds a handful of her hair. The image immediately stirred outrage online. Those who usually find themselves on the side of unfettered female sexual liberation called the cover regressive, degrading, and submissive toward the male gaze. Some fans defended the image, arguing that Carpenter was clearly satirizing incompetent and controlling men as well as her portrayal by the media as a “sex obsessed” pop star.

On my favorite Hollywood-focused podcast The Town, host Matt Belloni and his producer and guests offer predictions all the time on television ratings, relying on the Nielsen numbers for reference for what's anticipated versus what it turns out to be. Predictions for Saturday Night Live's fiftieth anniversary had it tracking above 20 million viewers — a reasonable expectation given the year-long promotional campaign and the fact that it would be on NBC, streaming on Peacock and on E! Network at the same time. The conversation on The Town was mostly a debate about whether it would hit 25 million, putting it well above expectations for the Oscars. Instead, it came in far lower, not even getting to 15 million — below the Grammy Awards, for sake of comparison.

I’ll be upfront: I’m skeptical of the trans movement. Not the individuals within it, but the broader cultural shift that prioritizes feelings over facts and subjectivity over objective reality. Yet, despite my reservations, I have deep empathy for those grappling with identity confusion — an experience that must be profoundly disorienting. My concern is that we’re accelerating this confusion by feeding a culture obsessed with validation. So, when I sat down to watch Will & Harper, I hoped, perhaps naively, that this film might grapple with these, my own very real questions, in a meaningful way. It doesn’t. What I found instead was a film that falls short as cinema and even shorter as a piece of prop art.

“Me and Vice President Harris are the same!” concluded Saturday Night Live veteran Dana Carvey, in character as Joe Biden, when he returned to NBC’s legendary sketch comedy show for the first episode of its fiftieth anniversary season. After Carvey, who left SNL’s regular ensemble in 1993, uttered those politically unhelpful words, former cast member Maya Rudolph, playing Kamala Harris, nervously gave him the bum rush off stage, only for him to wander back on to smell her hair — one of Biden’s stranger campaign trail moves — before the two delivered the show’s signature, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night!” line to a cheering studio audience, millions of viewers at home and millions more who (like me) caught it later via social media streaming.

Before the news of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump blew him off the front pages, the dramatic collapse of the trial of Alec Baldwin in a New Mexico courtroom was the most discussed story in American public life. Those attuned to cosmic ironies might note firstly that both the Trump and Baldwin stories revolved around the discharge of a firearm — accidentally and fatally in the case of Baldwin, deliberately and non-fatally in the case of Trump — and also in the abiding animosity between the two men, fanned by Baldwin’s continued impersonations of the former (and future?) president on Saturday Night Live. Yet the question now for Baldwin is what happens next.

When the history of comedy’s resurgence in the early twenty-first century is written — when masses of people, silenced by the speech codes of the day, found solace and contrarian hope in the words of unsilenced comics — Shane Gillis will be a major turning point in that story.  It’s not just that he’s arguably the best stand-up under forty working today; it’s that his work won out over all the obstacles the world threw at him. He is now the comedy world’s embodiment of the Streisand Effect, where his attempted cancellation functioned instead as a rocket ship for his career based not on victimhood but on the stubborn nature of his skill. Gillis’s first special, Live in Austin, was a YouTube joint that has racked up 14 million views.

In 2022's Triangle of Sadness, the first English language film from Force Majeure director Ruben Östlund, Woody Harrelson plays an addled Marxist captain of the Cristina O — in real life, the former yacht of the Onassis family, in the movie a doomed cruise vessel for the ludicrously rich. Harrelson is a jaded observer and capitalist critic who despises his passengers, choosing to order a cheeseburger and fries when others dine on oysters and caviar. He reads passages from Noam Chomsky into the microphone as the wealthy devolve into a roiling pile of puke and shit: "There are very few that are gonna look in the mirror and say, ‘the person I see is a savage monster.’ Instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.

Pete Davidson is comedy’s human Etch-A-Sketch. The King of Staten Island star is plastered in tattoos, though he’s proved indecisive of late as to what art he wants to wear on his skin for the rest of his life. Paparazzi photos that were published this weekend indicate that Davidson is ditching the elaborate depiction of the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Eagle-eyed Turning Points Memo reporter Hunter Walker spotted the in-progress removal after Davidson was snapped frolicking on a Hawaii beach with his Bodies Bodies Bodies co-star Chase Sui Wonders. https://twitter.