If you laugh during a Saturday Night Live sketch these days, even once, it’s a good idea to quietly give thanks. After 38 seasons and more than 750 episodes — even with SNL’s frequent breaks between new shows — it’s bound to be wildly uneven at times. Predictably unpredictable.
Clip shows like tonight’s SNL Thanksgiving Special are designed to highlight the best of the best, but one’s person’s best is not necessarily another’s. Favourite sketches, especially for the SNL fan who was there from the beginning, are bound to be lost in the shuffle.
This year’s SNL Thanksgiving leftovers include Ed Grimley’s Thanksgiving, featuring a young Martin Short; dysfunctional family get-togethers like The Bird Family, The Loud Family and Dysfunctional Family Dinner; a wacky parody of Martha Stewart Living; crowd favourite and Thanksgiving buzzkill Debbie Downer; the famous Greetings From Tonto, Tarzan and Frankenstein; and a reprise of Adam Sandler’s Turkey Song, with its catchy lyrics (“Eat that turkey, all night long / Fifty million Elvis fans, can’t be wrong / Turkey lurkey loo, turkey lurkey dap / I eat that turkey, then I take a nap.”)
Missing from the official, pre-released set list — but possibly waiting in the wings as a last-minute addition — is an SNL classic from yesteryear: ex cast-member Bill Hader’s loopy, inventive Vincent Price’s Thanksgiving Special 1958, from the show’s 2005 season.
In Hader’s hands, Vincent Price’s Thanksgiving was a wacky send-up of what might happen if the legendary master of horror was forced to put on a Thanksgiving special, good cheer and all, on a local TV station.
The wonderful, wildly inappropriate result was one of those moments when SNL reached for SCTV heights.
Hader played Price in evening jacket, clutching a glass of scotch uncertainly in one hand and trying to keep a stuffed raven perched on his shoulder with the other as, one by one, he introduced a cavalcade of inappropriate guests for Thanksgiving dinner (“Greetings, weary travellers. Tonight I offer you passage into the darkest recesses of the supernatural ... for this is the day we gorge on the flesh of a brutally decapitated fowl”).
Hader’s Price-y Thanksgiving Special might yet make the final cut. SNL fans and devotees of old horror films can only hope.
In the meantime, in addition to Rachel Dratch as Debbie Downer, Sandler’s Turkey Song and Ed Grimley’s Thanksgiving, viewers can expect to see the self-explanatory The Ladies’ Man, Paul’s Monologue Worries and Nikey Turkey.
Of course, leftovers are leftovers, and for the leftovers to be tasty, the dinner has to be good in the first place. 9 p.m., Global, NBC
Three to See
• Survivor, another TV constant, is now in its 27th season, but it has a few more years to go yet before it matches SNL’s record. In a Survivor: Blood vs. Water episode titled Gloves Come Off — no Thanksgiving sentiment there — one castaway tries a bold, possibly foolhardy move to smoke out the hidden immunity idol, while another lands in hot water (sorry) after playing both sides of the tribe. As for whether anyone cares, 2.1 million viewers across Canada watched the most recent outing — 600,000 of those viewers in Toronto alone. Survivor was the No. 5 show in the country for the week of Nov. 11-17, No. 4 in Toronto. 8 p.m., Global, CBS
• Republic of Doyle features a guest appearance by The Listener’s Craig Olejnik in Wednesday’s episode. With luck, and if Doyle holds true to form, the episode will be better than the tired synopsis makes it sound: Jake (Allan Hawco) is taken hostage during a robbery, and Leslie (Krystin Pellerin) has to find a way to resolve the standoff from the outside. 9 p.m., CBC
• Murder and mayhem rarely take a break on TV, not even for U.S. Thanksgiving. CSI features a new episode — one of the few new episodes of the night — in which the female staff escape for a weekend at a desert spa, only to find themselves at the centre of a murder investigation when Finlay (Elisabeth Shue) vanishes “without a trace,” as it were. 10 p.m., CTV, CBS
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