Television SNL vs Mad TV

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Which one is better?

Mad TV in its prime - Pre-2000s - was awesome. Both shows are sorta hit or miss with sketches. Mad TV had some of the most memorable characters. Mad TV sorta fell off in the 2000s, and SNL obviously has much more longevity. SNL sorta got fixated on politics this last few years and were beating a dead horse, so to speak.

Which one do you think is better?
 
I was always more into SNL but I would never deny that MadTV in its prime was quite funny and had a lot of performers that I really liked- Sasso, Nicole Sullivan, Key, and Peele being just a few.

Saturday Night Live is sort of in a class of its own in terms of longevity of a sketch comedy show. Generally, they don't last THAT long. I thought In Living Color, for instance, was hilarious but it was on several years and SNL was on for decades. You could certainly say one show was better than certain eras of the other but there's just so much overall material to view when it comes to SNL.
 
Prime Mad Tv benefited from SNL mainstays heading off for movies around that time. I loved the first 4-5 season of MadTv, but I don't think they could compete with the SNL that had Hartman, Farley, Sandler, Spade or Carvey, Meyers, McDonald, etc.

I think once Will Farrell got popular on SNL and Michael McDonald/Alex Borstein got popular on Mad TV, it was the beginning of the end for both of them.


They were both awesome and I used to stay up every Saturday in the 90's to watch Mad TV, then switch over after the SNL monologue.
 
Contrary to what lot of my bethren may think, I actually found SNL funny during Kristen Wiig's tenure there. It is trash now, bur between the 80's, 90's, 00's, and early 10's, I think SNL takes it for longevity.
 
Contrary to what lot of my bethren may think, I actually found SNL funny during Kristen Wiig's tenure there. It is trash now, bur between the 80's, 90's, 00's, and early 10's, I think SNL takes it for longevity.

I think Kristen Wiig is talented as hell. She hosted last episode, look how good she is here:



I think Kate McKinnon is great as well... a bit goofy. Melissa Villasenor seems to be making a name for herself as well with the impressions.
 
90s SNL with Farley, Sandler, Myers, Carvey, Rock, Norm, Hartman

And even the early 00s was better with Ferrell, Fey, Amy, Kristen, Hader, Andy

I really enjoyed the Ferrell/Oteri/Gasteyer/Shannon/Kattan/Fallon/Sanz/Fey/Dratch era but the more I think about it, the era with Forte, Hader, Wiig, Armisen, Samberg, Sudeikis was even better.

Then you have people who bridged those two casts like Poehler and Rudolph who are among the best female SNL performers ever in my opinion.

Hader and Armisen were amazing though. Among my favorites. Kenan is consistently great and has been part of at least three era of the show at this point lol.

Really liked the early 2010s- toward the end of Hader's and Armisen's and Samberg's run when Nasim and Vanessa Bayer joined up. Really solid cast.

But yeah- you can't beat the late 80s early 90s cast in my view. Even if Sandler wasn't your cup of tea (I really liked him but I know some found him overplayed), Myers, Carvey, Hartman, Farley were among the best of all time. And Spade and Sandler were certainly no slouches. Lovitz was great in his day too.
 
I felt like MadTV was at its strongest when SNL had already begun its decline. Key and Peel were great on MadTV, they had some hilarious sketches. Bobby Lee also had some very good stuff during his time there. The semi-reoccurring Gotcha News! was also funny when it popped up. MadTV didn't engage in celebrity worship to the same extent SNL tended to, so that made it a bit more fun to watch as well. I think they sometimes suffered from the same problem that has long-plagued SNL though--not knowing how to finish sketches.
 
Kids in the Hall > In Living Colour, just saying.

Also, Prime Mad TV and Bobby Lee?
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He joined in 2001. Kirk Kilbane was on during Prime Mad Tv, so was the guy that played the phys ed teacher in the Goldbergs. He was the pool boy.
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I think Kristen Wiig is talented as hell. She hosted last episode, look how good she is here:



I think Kate McKinnon is great as well... a bit goofy. Melissa Villasenor seems to be making a name for herself as well with the impressions.


She was the best female cast on the show IMO. She obviously doesn't take herself too seriously. Where as a lot of the new cast will say their line and then look to the camara for approval.

Whilst she can hit gold on occasion, I'm not a fan of McKinnon. She basically just does an impression and then gets overly vulgar. It is funny the first few times, but is very one dimensional IMO.
 
I think Kristen Wiig is talented as hell. She hosted last episode, look how good she is here:



I think Kate McKinnon is great as well... a bit goofy. Melissa Villasenor seems to be making a name for herself as well with the impressions.


Villasenor is really good. It struck me that they didn't seem to know what to do with her in her first couple of seasons- underutilized but generally quite funny when she got to do her thing. Now she has really gotten into a groove. She excels at impressions. There was that one sketch where she, Alex Moffat, and Octavia Spencer are doing celebrity voiceovers for Zootopia style knockoff animated film and her impressions of Kathy Griffin, Wiig, Mckinnon were all spot on.

McKinnon has been an all star since basically the first season she started. There's a reason certain people just break out. Wiig was one of them. There was a time where she and Hader were sort of dominating the show. Two very talented people. But that whole cast was impressive. There's a reason why virtually all of them- Sudeikis, Wiig, Hader, Armisen, Samberg all went on to significant success afterwards.

Wiig is so natural in sketch comedy. Poehler and she are probably two of the best cast members of all time.
 
Villasenor is really good. It struck me that they didn't seem to know what to do with her in her first couple of seasons- underutilized but generally quite funny when she got to do her thing. Now she has really gotten into a groove. She excels at impressions.

I notice good impressions do not always translate into funny skits. For example, I don't think Jay Pharoah did as well as people would have expected after all of his YouTube videos went viral. It's good for Melissa that she excelled at it.
 
But the crazy thing about McKinnon, Aidy Bryant, and Cecily Strong is that they have all been on for about eight years at this point. Long run and I don't think any of them are necessarily leaving soon.

It might get to that point where McKinnon finds she has enough other offers and can make too much money from them that it doesn't pay to stay. In 2019 she was in two movies I watched- Yesterday and Bombshell. Filiming those in addition to the SNL schedule- even when you factor in off season- must be grueling.

Cecily Strong is underratedly hilarious in my opinion. From when she was doing the ex-porn star commercials with similarly talented Bayer to her impressions and her range. While McKinnon often does off-kilter and zany, Strong can go all over the map in terms of being the straight (wo)man in a sketch or being the punchline.

Aidy is very good as well.

I'm less familiar with the current guys in the cast but Beck Bennett definitely seems to have that Parnell everyman type of vibe down and is reliably good. Mooney is pretty hilarious as well though I'm not sure they always know how to use him right.
 
I notice good impressions do not always translate into funny skits. For example, I don't think Jay Pharoah did as well as people would have expected after all of his YouTube videos went viral. It's good for Melissa that she excelled at it.

I think the problem with Jay was that they sort of pigeonholed him into what type of sketches he could be in. But when he was on, he was ON. His Will Smith moment in this sketch is so damn funny that I'll often go back to it. Not only a spot on impression but even the content of what he's saying- praising his kids as extremely mature in one breath, while portraying them as extremely sheltered/overprotected in the next.



I thought he and Nasim had a solid dynamic as Kanye and Kim Kardashian too even if his Kanye impression was not as good as some of his other ones.

I think he was so good with celebrity impressions that they could not really figure out ways to use him well in other sketches.
 
I really enjoyed the Ferrell/Oteri/Gasteyer/Shannon/Kattan/Fallon/Sanz/Fey/Dratch era but the more I think about it, the era with Forte, Hader, Wiig, Armisen, Samberg, Sudeikis was even better.

Then you have people who bridged those two casts like Poehler and Rudolph who are among the best female SNL performers ever in my opinion.

Hader and Armisen were amazing though. Among my favorites. Kenan is consistently great and has been part of at least three era of the show at this point lol.

Really liked the early 2010s- toward the end of Hader's and Armisen's and Samberg's run when Nasim and Vanessa Bayer joined up. Really solid cast.

But yeah- you can't beat the late 80s early 90s cast in my view. Even if Sandler wasn't your cup of tea (I really liked him but I know some found him overplayed), Myers, Carvey, Hartman, Farley were among the best of all time. And Spade and Sandler were certainly no slouches. Lovitz was great in his day too.

Will Fortes best SNL sketch imo



At least one of my favorites I discovered today. I couldn't stop laughing lol
 
Mad TV has been terrible practically every time I watch it. SNL golden years for me was the 80's-90's, back when political stuff didnt offend everybody.
 
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