The Cull of the Wild

By Margaret Hicks in Arts & Entertainment on Sep 25, 2006 5:18PM

The wait is over folks. The final cast for “Saturday Night Live” has been announced. There were a few surprises (Chris Parnell is gone? Seriously? He was just getting good), along with Horatio Sans (no surprise there). Horatio is a friend of Chicagoist, a damn funny guy, and has one of the dirtiest minds we’ve ever known, but sometimes, the kid just laughs too much at his own jokes. We hope he comes home though; Chicago hasn’t been the same without him.

Seth Meyers has been partnered up with Amy Poehler to do the Weekend Update. Amy Poehler can do whatever she wants as far as we’re concerned, and Seth Meyers sure is pretty to look at. He’s also been named head writer along with Andrew Steele and Paula Pell. We’ll miss Tina Fey, but can catch her and long-time performance partner, the rubbery Rachel Dratch, on the October 11th premiere of “30 Rock”.

Darrell Hammond is hanging in there, either he’s incredibly intelligent for sticking with what works, or too tired to make up a funny enough character to have his own movie. We got to see a filming of SNL and we chatted with Darrell in the green room. This was roughly five years ago and we gotta tell you, the guy looked haggard even then.

The new season will start on September 30th, hosted by hottie-mchotsalot Dane Cook. We’ll see if a smaller cast (now there are eleven actors as opposed to sixteen) can tighten things up. And if anyone wants our opinion on how to make the show better, here it is: pull their eyes away from that effing teleprompter and let the comics do what you hired them to do — improvise.