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By Dustin Rowles | TV Reviews | January 8, 2012 | Comments ()

Charles Barkley hosted the year’s first “Saturday Night Live,” last night; it was his third stint, and while I don’t remember his first two, if they were anything like last night’s show, I have no goddamn idea why they’d ask him to come back. Even by “Saturday Night Live” standards, last night was a bad show. Barkley spent the entire night badly reading from cue cards in a very dull, monotone. Given the long break in between shows, you’d think that the writers might have come up with something decent. Instead, they wrote the entire show around Barkley, which is weird because many of their much, much better hosts are typically relegated to supporting roles. A lot of the skits were sports-related, and clearly, the writers aren’t all that knowledgeable of sports, and even when they came up with a decent idea, it was poorly executed by Barkley. And Jesus Christ! It was one of the biggest weeks in politics in a while, and all they could come up with for a cold open was a bad Santorum skit about how he plans to visit every house in America (even in hostile areas) to stump for votes.

Seriously, it was a mess; I figured, because they knew that there’d be an NFL game on NBC that would push back the start time, that they’d phone this one in. But they didn’t even pick up the phone. They faxed in it on one of those 1984 doohickeys. It was truly a dreadful exercise in not only pain management, but in how long you could stay awake for a show that ran until past 1:30 a.m. knowing after the first three skits that it would only go downhill from there.

Here are the highlights, and I’m being generous in calling it that.

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THE REST OF THE PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

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