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July 21, 2008

Saturday Night Live Off to Early Start

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. --NBC is smartly bringing back “Saturday Night Live” a few weeks early next season to satirize the happenings in the presidential election campaign.

The season premiere will be Sept. 13, the first of four Saturday shows in a row. "SNL" will air seven times before the November election and have 22 episodes next season compared to the usual 20. Additionally, it will have three, 30-minute prime time Thursday airings in October.

Seth Meyers, the show’s head writer and co-host of “Weekend Update,” told me at a NBC party that the cast had no influence on the decision but was happy to start the season early.

“If we learned anything last year (during the writers strike), it was not to take for granted working,” said Meyers.

He conceded the program is having the same problem that everybody else is having with the presumed Democratic nominee, Barack Obama.

“The difficulty with Obama isn’t whether or not we’re being fair, it’s … ‘What’s the big comedy thing?’”

“Maybe it’s better for this country,” Meyers dryly added, “that somebody might run for president where it’s not obvious what’s funny about them.”

-- Alan Pergament

Posted at 08:26 AM |

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Everyone watches TV. Alan Pergament watches TV for a living... and has been reviewing shows for 25 years. If you have favorite shows or can't stand something you saw last night and want to talk about it, check in here with Pergament and our other television experts, TV Topics editor Toni Ruberto and television columnist Jeff Simon.

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Reader comments are posted immediately and are not edited. Please use good taste, be respectful of other writers, keep comments relevant to the post and do not impersonate someone else. We are not responsible for the comments on this blog, but we reserve the right to remove any that are libelous, obscene, threatening, abusive, or otherwise offensive, and to block any user who does not follow these guidelines. Comments containing objectionable words are automatically blocked. Some comments may be re-published in The Buffalo News print edition.