TV Guidance

TV Guidance

Jaime Weinman writes about all kinds of television and other kinds of popular culture. He does not write Gossip Girl episode reviews. Follow Jaime on Twitter: @weinmanj

"Why Must You Deprive Us of These Movies, Mr. Michaels? Do You Hate Joy?"

by Jaime Weinman on Thursday, March 5, 2009 12:12pm - 2 Comments

Nathan Rabin has figured out why the world has sucked so much since 2000: it’s been that long since there was a feature film based on a Saturday Night Live character. That means that the last person to bring an SNL character to the big screen was Tim Meadows, as smooth-talking radio host Leon Phelps in The Ladies Man (not to be confused with the Jerry Lewis movie of the same name). Since then… nothing. Not even the Italian talk-show host.

Thanks to Lorne, Andy Samberg did get to make a movie that was basically exactly like an SNL spinoff movie (including that thing where they have a few funny parts surrounded by immense quantities of filler), but didn’t actually use characters from the show. Baby Mama, same deal; Lorne produced it, and it felt like an SNL skit blown up to 90 minutes, but it was not actually based on an SNL sketch. Lorne really does seem to have lost his passion for turning five-minute sketches into 90-minute movies, but it does seem like a failure of nerve that he hasn’t yet made Oh, No! Guy — The Movie.

Bookmark and Share
  • Zug Zug

    What about a painfully awful MacGruber movie? Doesn’t that seems like a concept that would stretch out nicely for an hour and a half.

  • John

    Virtually all of Will Ferrell’s writer/star movies are pseudo-SNL skits where many of the scenes within the movie can be modularly shifted from one part of the film to the other with no decrease in either character development or continuity, so in large part that’s made any need for the same thing coming directly out of Lorne’s production company superfluous.

From Macleans