mayarudolph

(S33E03) "Amy Poehler: 1986": I thought that this was a great choice for a cold open! A young, big-haired Amy Poehler being visited by a magical poster version of Jon Bon Jovi? Fantastic. In general, it was really cute and made me feel a little better about Bon Jovi's hosting abilities. I mean, not that it really mattered because he barely appeared in this episode, not counting the musical performances. Hey, whatever it takes to promote an album, right?

(S19E02) Mr. Burns: My boy, you are a star!

Homer: Whoo-Hoo!

Burns: An opera star!

Homer: Oh.

We're back to the silly in this week's episode of The Simpsons as another bodily injury gives Homer an advantage in life. I'm surprised that this is the second Homer-centric episode in a row. Usually, the producers are good at going around the Simpsons circuit to focus on another family member or the group as a whole from one week to the next. Maybe my surprise is due to the fact that I haven't been a regular on the Simpsons boat for the last few seasons.

Contrary to many, many reports that have been circulating this past week (including one from TV Guide's Michael Ausiello a few days ago), Maya Rudolph has indeed left Saturday Night Live. The news is confirmed by NBC.

This is too bad. Rudolph really grew on me over the years, and I loved many characters she did, including Oprah, Whitney Houston, Donatella, and one half of those Bronx women who host a local cable show. Funny, I always thought that Amy Poehler would be next to leave, following Tina Fey to a career in movies and her own TV show. But Rudolph has been on the show for several seasons and good for her with going on to the next thing in her life.

SNL's season premiere is this Saturday, with guests Lebron James and Kanye West.

Update: Actually, she changed her mind and is now staying.

A sketch has surfaced over at FunnyorDie.com starring Conan O'Brien. It appears to be a sketch from the Saturday Night Live episode that he hosted in 2001. The sketch was cut from the live airing of the show and hasn't been seen until now.

While watching the sketch you get the feeling that it was something that he always wanted to do on his own show but could never fit it in. The premise is pure Late Night but the sketch is way too long and too involved to have worked on a talk show.

Boy, $13,500 per month really doesn't buy much in New York these days, does it? After SNLer Maya Rudolph and her husband, director Paul Thomas Anderson moved into a 3rd floor luxury loft in New York's Soho section, they found that they and their daughter were getting bitten by bedbugs. Bedbugs!

What's worse, they couldn't leave their apartment to escape the critters because the elevator was broken for six of the first eleven days they were in the apartment (what, they couldn't use the stairs?). After an exterminator told them to leave the apartment for a few weeks for the sake of their baby, they decided to never come back. Now they're suing the landlord, Francis Feeney, and the broker, Halstead Property, LLC, for $450,000 in compensatory and punitive damages.

Jeez, for $13.5k a month, I'd expect a hermetically-sealed apartment that lets in nothing but hibiscus-scented air. But that's just me.

A little over a week ago, we gave you folks an opportunity to select the Saturday Night Live cast members that you thought might be leaving at the end of this season, based on a remark Lorne Michaels gave to The New York Times. We let you choose more than one person, since it looks like more than one person is going to leave.

So, who did you think was going to go? Well, there's no surprise here: Darrell Hammond and Horatio Sanz received the most votes, with the still-on-maternity-leave Maya Rudolph coming in third. It makes sense; Hammond's been on the show for eons and is basically down to doing impressions of Chris Matthews and Donald Trump, and Sanz is... well, let's just say he's not the most popular member of the cast. The surprise was the lack of votes for Seth Myers, even though his name has been coming up quite a bit in the rumors surrounding Michaels' pronouncement.

Full poll results are after the jump.