Saturday Night Live

A decades-long chronicle of the process by which edgy counterculture overstays its welcome long enough to become subsumed into mainstream culture until it becomes a rudder of pop culture, a standard avenue by which politicos and aristocrats make themselves palatable to a worshipful public. But sometimes they get some good writers and good performers and make the viewer forget for a moment that they long since became even more worthy of derision than those they claim to satirize.

It's obviously impossible to give this show a fair rating due to how wildly the quality varies, even within individual episodes - over the years, it's produced some classic bits of comedy (along with even more clunkers, especially recently). Still, it's undeniably a cultural institution, and I have to respect that.

It's a bizarre show that never works. When talking to people about this show I've noticed that when people describe it they always say the generation before them was good. So someone in the 90's will be like "yeah it sucks now, but it was really good in the 80's!" and someone in the 00's will say "yeah it sucks now but it was really good in the 90s!" Truth is, it always has sucked, always will suck. For every good sketch you see there's probably 50 that completely bomb. A terrible overrated show

This rating is based on the episodes from the 80's and 90's, because I haven't seen the 70's episodes, and the show has been dead since the new millennium. Over the decades, there were a lot of ups and downs, but overall, it set the template for contemporary comedy in a way that few programs can claim to, and it was one of the few places where enormously talented writers and performers could come together to do basically whatever they wanted, free from the constraints of narrative or good taste.

Honestly don't know how to rate this show fairly, as it is so iconic that its lesser years age well and become great years. Generally, though, it has maintained a steady level of quality in the past decade that REALLY depends on the host almost as much as the cast.

The ROI for rummaging through the clips is shit.

Wildly inconsistent. It has legendary sketches buried among scores of inane ones.

Difficult to pin a rating on. If I was forced to sit through every second of every episode I'd probably find it utterly torturous and despise it. But the occasional online highlight is pretty enjoyable.

I like the show very much but only like 5% of the sketches.

Far too hit and miss. Some sketches are timeless and influential for the state of comedy but actually sitting through a full episode from any given year has at least a couple of painfully unfunny sketches, some years of the show are far worse than others but even at its best the good was often outweighed by the bad.