I know, I know. Saturday Night Live used to be better! Specifically, SNL was at its best when you were between the ages of 15 and 20 and started watching it for the first time. You'll never forget that magical era when Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan (OR Mike Myers and Dana Carvey OR Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo OR Bill Murray and Gilda Radner) were anchoring the action. And, eventually, when you hear your kids in 10 years talking about how the Kate McKinnon and Beck Bennett era was the real golden age of SNL, you'll sadly chuckle and tell them about the magic of the Night at the Roxbury guys (OR Wayne's World OR Mr. Robinson's Neighborhood OR Nick the Lounge Singer).
Because everything new is terrible and everything was better when you were younger.
That being said, sometimes SNL captures some of that old magic, deftly skewering some absurd grotesquerie of modern culture for the entertainment of all. For instance, this week the show perfectly captured the idiocy of Twitter outrage culture and the silly smallness of identity politics. Check it:
There's so much to love here. The complete and utter inability to properly satisfy every constituency. The self-righteous proclamations about the lack of progressiveness on what is easily the most regressive TV format, the three-camera sitcom. The sheer lunacy of getting upset that a little girl on a TV show would be into ballet, and the equally lunatic notion of turning her into a staff sergeant in the Marine Corps.
The one false note comes near the end. It's not so much the idea that some conservatives would complain about the changes (they probably would; the politicized life is a double-edged sword). It was more the "P.S. Obamacare!" in one of the letters. That simply fails the ideological Turing test. Every single one of the tweets complaining about that un-PC nature of the show felt real. Heck, some of them probably are real. (Remember when there was a weeks-long debate about the gay dads in Modern Family not kissing onscreen? Good times!) The conservative letters, on the other hand, were hit and miss.
A minor complaint, though. Who would've guessed that SNL would've been the first program to accurately display the complexities of the ever-shifting Pyramid of Grievances?