Hydra Island Bonus: Saturday Night LOST!
Hosting Saturday Night Live is a big deal, even if Saturday Night Live itself sometimes isn’t.
Fifty whole years after its initial broadcast, getting tapped to be the weekly host for the NBC sketch show still feels like a high compliment, a signifier of having “made it”, an attained status of being notable or interesting enough to try your chops at sketch comedy, often for the first time. This has been a more-or-less immutable truth, even when SNL itself is in a bit of a rut. Take the infamous twentieth season, as the experiment of “handing the keys over to a pair of aloof young guys (Adam Sandler & David Spade) and an out-of-control fan favorite (Chris Farley)” nearly ended the show permanently. Still, scanning the list of hosts that year gives you a fairly accurate snapshot of 1994-95 at a glance. John Travolta, David Hyde Pierce, Paul Reiser, George Clooney, Courtney Cox, Deion Sanders, David Duchovny...regardless of the quality of their hosting abilities*, they had all inarguably earned the chance to raise their spotlight even further. The compliment fit them.
*In order: fine, good, bad, surprisingly good, not as strong as you’d hope, abysmal, and quite good.
So it went for Matthew Fox on December 2, 2006, when he became the one and only LOST cast member to ever cut his teeth in Studio 8H. As he will remind us early in the episode, he arguably should have hosted back during his Party of Five days; in some ways, then, this feels like a makeup call, especially when one considers that there are roughly ten LOST actors you would have picked to star in a comedy program over him. Jorge Garcia seems like the obvious choice, although I would have loved to see what Josh Holloway could do within the confines of SNL. Hell, I might have even given Michael Emerson or Terry O’Quinn a chance to see if some of their weirdo onscreen energy could translate to SNL (in the spirit of a Christoph Waltz).
It’s also surprising that other LOST performers never got a chance to host SNL during other periods of fame both before and after the show left the airwaves. If you had told me Dominic Monaghan or Evangeline Lilly had hosted at some point in the last twenty years, I would have believed you. Alas, to date, this is not the case. Maybe if Beaumont Kim returns in THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU or Tauriel makes a cameo in LORD OF THE RINGS: THE HUNT FOR GOLLUM, they’ll get their chance.
Anyway, I thought watching what is currently available of the Matthew Fox SNL episode (with musical guest Tenacious D) would make for a fun bonus article before the Season Five review, especially considering I had actually never seen it! What follows then, are my observations from watching Fox’s night in New York!
My SNL blindspots
It may be surprising to hear that I, a fan of both LOST and SNL, had never seen this “Worlds Collide” moment. But it’s true! The reason for this was two-fold. One, the episode aired on December 2, 2006, smack dab in the middle of LOST Season Three’s winter break, where the show was mired in a lot of drab and uninteresting plotlines (the polar bear cages! Locke’s weird sweat lodge dreams! Ben’s back surgery!), and I was having my own sincere doubts towards what I had thought was my favorite show. Even if I had been aware that Matthew Fox was hosting SNL, I likely wouldn’t have had the spirit to enjoy it at that moment.
Two, and more importantly….I just wasn’t watching SNL much during this time! My SNL fandom has existed in two phases. The first phase was roughly from 2000 to 2006, piggy-backing off the hype of the show’s 25th anniversary, where people like my mom started reflecting nostalgically back on the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players, and seemingly every cable channel had their own package of classic sketches, monologues, and musical performances. America had SNL fever, and the only prescription (at least for me) was starting to watch new episodes on Saturday night, forming new memories of the then-current cast (Will Ferrell, Jimmy Fallon, Ana Gesteyer, and eventually Amy Poehler, Seth Meyers, Tina Fey, Fred Armisen, and Will Forte). This phase ended roughly around high school graduation, when new adventures and priorities awaited me (like sitting around and doing nothing).
The second and still-ongoing phase started around 2012, when I realized, “Hey! I haven’t watched a new episode of SNL in ages! I’m home on Saturdays now; what if we started being regular viewers again?” Although my wife and I have missed or intentionally skipped an episode here or there (we couldn’t bear to see Elon stumble through sketch comedy a couple of years ago, and we’ve been fast-forwarding through the profoundly milquetoast cold opens for probably close to a decade now), we’ve been regular viewers ever since.
Astute fans may notice that the remaining gap of 2006 to 2012 (which spanned my college career and my brutal era of regularly working nights and weekends) almost perfectly coincides with a very fertile and popular era of SNL. If we generally consider 1975-1980 as the show’s original Golden Age (roughly spanning Belushi, Chevy/Murray, Aykroyd, Gilda, Curtin, Laraine, etc.), and 1986 to 1991 as the show’s Silver Age (bridging the Hartman/Dana/Lovitz/Nora Dunn/Jan Hooks/Kevin Nealon era and the Farley/Sandler/Spade/Norm/Myers era), then 2006-2012 is almost certainly its Bronze Age. We’ve got Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, and The Lonely Island emerging as generational comedic voices, comedy mainstays Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Kenan Thompson, Jason Sudeikis and Seth Meyers holding things down, and the aforementioned Armisen and Forte given the space to be the all-time oddballs that they were. And I missed pretty much all of it! I was too busy, I dunno, doing chorus work in college productions of Seussical the Musical and being awkward around girls to watch SNL with any regularity. Whatareyagonnado?
Anyway, watching this Matthew Fox episode reminded me that I have quite a bit of SNL lore to sift through to make up for lost time, a task that has actually gotten harder over time, thanks to…
The state of the SNL archives.
I mentioned in the intro that I’m reviewing what is “currently available” of this particular episode. This is because, for the most part, an aspiring SNL completist is at the mercy of what is currently uploaded on the NBC Peacock streaming service. Yes, the best/most notable sketches have long been available via Best-of DVDs and, more recently, the official SNL YouTube channel. But the “official” archive essentially consists of the first five seasons in full, all of which also have an official DVD release, and cut-down episodes for basically the remaining 45 years. Some episodes from the 00’s are only 15 minutes or so!
*It should be noted that they have done an excellent job at also making more obscure favorites available as well. You can even find famous debacles officially uploaded, like the bafflingly bad “Peace, we outta here!” sketch.
As infuriating as this is, the reason for it is obvious. I mean, yes, the oft-cited issue with music rights makes it exceedingly difficult to track down individual musical guest performances or sketches that make use of real songs. But, beyond that, I think Broadway Video (and specifically Lorne Michaels) would prefer SNL be evaluated as a series of individual sketches from all across the past half-century, not as a series of linear episodes. Many, many, many SNL sketches are terrific; many actual episodes are, when taken from top to bottom, kinda average! It’s the nature of the machine. When everyone on staff is waiting until the Monday and Tuesday before showtime to write (a specific type of cokehead schedule maintained purely out of tradition), there’s always going to be a certain amount of chaff with the wheat. More of the show is ultimately forgettable than you might imagine.
That’s all well and good, but it ignores and belies SNL’s status as an incredible time capsule. One of the great joys of actually working your way through SNL from start to finish is watching pop culture morph and change through the decades. To see the musical guests go from Luther Vandross and Dolly Parton to Vanilla Ice and Mariah Carey, then from Britney Spears and Eminem to Arcade Fire and Taylor Swift…I find that genuinely exciting! This can only be possible through a true and complete archive.
“The Internet Archive! The Internet Archive!” you may be yelling through the screen. Yes, it’s true. For years and years and years, just such a true and complete archive existed on that beautiful site, compiled from recordings of live broadcasts and reruns. As a matter of fact, I had been working my way through it myself for the past few years. Nope! It and playlists just like it were all copyright-stricken a few months ago, seemingly never to return. Alas! Without it, we’d never be able to find a weird appreciation for vaguely mediocre episodes like “Matthew Fox/Tenacious D”...
Matthew Fox is apparently a Matthew FOX.
Oh yeah, the actual episode itself.
It’s fine! For the most part, Fox proves himself to be a net-average SNL host. Although he absolutely never looks nervous, and is obviously willing to jump in and do silly voices and characters, the episode is mostly comfortable having him play himself half the time. This is more or less what I expected; it’s the standard move for the show when you have a host that is ready and willing, but maybe not always capable. This is not a slight; there have been many hosts who have been incapable and neither ready or willing! Just giving a damn is two-thirds of the battle. In that sense, Matthew Fox has cleared like 40% of the show’s prior hosts.
Something I didn’t expect from this episode is that Matthew Fox is often treated on the show as a dreamy sex symbol. The two big sketches (“LOST Elevator” and “Mountain Man”) have punchlines that boil down to “Matthew Fox is a hot guy that all the women want to fuck”. Poehler, Wiig and Maya Rudolph all get their opportunity to homina-homina-homina over Dr. Jack Shephard.
To be clear: I don’t have a problem with this! Although SNL can sometimes use “the host is hot and everyone is horny for them” as a no-confidence crutch (with the recent Jacob Elordi-hosted episode being an egregious example), I don’t really care if the show acknowledges the simple fact that entertainers tend to be gorgeous. I just had never really met anybody that put Matthew fucking Fox in “sex symbol” territory. This may be a simple matter of generation: girls my age were way, way, waaaay more into Ian Somerhalder and Dominic Monaghan than Matthew Fox. A lot of genuine adults who were watching LOST probably got in fuego for Fox; I simply didn’t interact with them.
Anyway, that was a genuine revelation. I was also surprised at how relatively bereft in LOST content the episode really was…
“LOST” Elevator
One might have assumed having the star of a hit TV show hosting SNL would have guaranteed a big sketch doing a full-on parody of said show, much like they did for TWIN PEAKS when Kyle MacLachlan came to town. Not so for Matthew Fox and LOST! I think the show may have possibly avoided it due to the fact that the SNL players at that time weren't a good match for imitating the LOST cast. Like, who would have played who? I guess Amy Poehler could have played a pregnant Claire, Kristin Wiig would have gotten Kate by default, Fox would have played Jack…who else? Who would a very young Bill Hader or Andy Samberg have played? Would Locke have been Darrell Hammond in a bald cap? Maaaaaybe you can squint your eyes and imagine Jason Sudeikis wearing a blonde wig and doing his best Sawyer? It wasn’t worth figuring out. The only missed opportunity here may have been Kenan playing a very obviously grown up Walt.
Instead, they went a different, and stronger, direction with their LOST tribute. The centerpiece sketch for this episode is Matthew Fox playing himself getting stuck in an elevator with a rotating selection of LOST fans bugging him with questions. It’s pretty good! Armisen shines as an ultra-New York guy who’s convinced the show is being made up, and Poehler and Rudolph are fun as two women who want to, get this, fuck Matthew Fox. But the real virtue of the sketch is that it’s a fairly accurate representation of what it felt like to talk about LOST to people in late 2006. It speaks to the accuracy of the writing that I got viscerally upset with Samberg cockily proclaiming “purgatory” over and over.
Naturally, it’s a SNL sketch premise that’s not wholly original for the show. There’s been a plethora of “guest actor is stuck on an elevator with obnoxious people” sketches over the past thirty years or so, starting back to at least a David Schwimmer skit from Season 21. But it’s a good fit for this particular actor on this particular hit program, a show that undoubtedly led to Fox fielding a bunch of weird questions from baffled fans. It’s a good sketch, and one worth holding onto considering the rest of the show was….
A mediocre effort.
It’s otherwise a pretty quiet night for Studio 8H. Like a vast majority of SNL episodes, it’s bogged down by its attempts to address the news of the week. We have a looooong press conference translator cold open to kick things off, followed by a looooooong Nancy Grace sketch. Neither make for a lot of great comedy (unless you really like esoteric impressions of the prime minister of Iraq), although, again, it does make for a nice time capsule. Even if I didn’t already know when this aired, the early references to Michael Richards’ Laugh Factory meltdown and O.J. Simpson’s If I Did It book would have clued me into us being firmly in late 2006 territory.
We also have an entry in the recurring sketch series Deep House Dish, which I also thought was pretty rough, an excuse to just kind of be wacky, which I contend is a little separate from also being funny. At this point, I was sort of regretting committing to writing about this episode. Besides a stellar Michael Richards impression from Bill Hader in the monologue, and an okay (and prescient) Walmart commercial parody (and of course, the elevator sketch), this had been a pretty dull outing. I didn’t even get anything out of the normally reliable…
Weekend Update
Weekend Update seemed to be in an odd transitional state in 2006. Amy Poehler had found great success paired with Tina Fey behind the desk for a couple of years prior, and Seth Meyers would go on to have a great solo run later in the decade (and establish himself as one of the best anchors in interacting with the “correspondents”). But Poehler and Meyers, at least based off of this outing and the little I’ve seen beyond, are a bit of an overrated pair.
To be fair, this was pretty early in their run; Meyers had only taken over the desk a few months prior. But you’d be surprised how many jokes get only light laughter from the crowd (spoiler: it’s most of them). The correspondents are a mixed bag; I actually like Wiig’s Aunt Linda, maybe because I didn’t watch her get run into the ground over time. But the concept of a movie reviewer who seems baffled by the very idea of fiction is a good bit, one laced with accuracy (there are a lot of people out there who consume all media like this). I wasn’t high on Rudolph’s Whitney Houston, which felt really half-assed. I cannot comment on the Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton commentary, which features Darrell Hammond in blackface, since Peacock cut it from the episode for some reason.
The good news is, once you push through the midpoint of the episode, you start finding some….
Hidden gems in the back half.
Things pick up with the “Mountain Man” sketch, which begins its life as a surreal, vaguely stream-of-consciousness scenario, with Fox’s mountain man imploring Wiig and Poehler for a slice of their pie. This alone would have been sort of okay, and at least an improvement over Deep House Dish. But it starts becoming something special when it breaks the fourth wall mid-sketch, where Fox as himself starts objecting to the script changes that are specifically put in place to let Amy and Kristen make out with him. I especially like Fox’s rant about how disrespected he now feels as an actor, and how much work and research he put into the mountain man character, if only because he somehow strikes me as that kind of performer. Add in a cameo appearance by actual SNL writer Emily Spivey and Maya Rudolph’s Lorne Michaels impression towards the end, and we’re really getting somewhere.
My favorite sketch of the night is largely dependent on my love for Fred Armisen’s specific shtick, which is like nails on a chalkboard for some, but hits my specific comedic sweet spot. A Mayan leader is about to start rallying his people into battle, but ends up distracted and delighted by having a sip of a new drink made from cocoa beans. Frded being so over the moon out of having hot chocolate for the first time is essentially the one joke in the three minute sketch, but goddamnit, nobody runs a bit into the ground like Armisen (non-derogatory).
I can’t comment on either of Tenacious D’s performances since neither of them are on the Peacock version. This is sort of a bummer, as their second song “The Metal” seems like an all-out affair, with the actual cast getting involved. On the other hand, I infamously do not really get Tenacious D, so maybe it’s best for everyone that I don’t get involved. I also can’t comment on the one big Will Forte showcase here, a sketch entitled “History Buff” because that’s also not included. Assuming there’s no big music cue involved, I am shocked and borderline offended that NBC would cut this but preserve Deep fucking House Dish. Peacock? More like Piss Penis!
Lonely Island fans may be asking, “Uh, what about the Digital Short Matthew Fox was in?” Well, smartypants, it turned out that it actually aired the following week, during the Annette Bening/Gwen Stefani & Akon episode (there’s a host/musical guest pairing for the ages). Again, your appreciation for it will go only as far as your tolerance for Armisen shtick can take you, but it’s a decent net-average Digital Short.
Final thoughts
If the comments on this episode’s page on the “One SNL a Day Project” website is any indication, this is a fairly beloved episode of the show, although that appears largely predicated off of the unavailable Will Forte sketch. As it stands, I generally agree with the sentiment that it picks up in the second half, but that first half is fairly milquetoast. Fox does pretty good overall, but he comes off as a classic One-Timer; not at all embarrassing, but nothing special. In a lot of ways, then, “Matthew Fox/Tenacious D” is the ideal typical SNL night.
On the whole, this episode constitutes the majority of the LOST references SNL would ever make. This Lostpedia entry details the five or six other ones over the course of six years, which feels light for a show that felt like such a unifying sensation in its first year or so. The elevator sketch from Matthew Fox’s episode appears to be LOST’s greatest mark on SNL. As far as legacies go, though, that’s not too bad!
I still wanna strangle Samberg when he says “purgatory”, though.