Saturday Night Live (1975)

SATIRED OUT In a listless new season for Saturday Night Live, Poehler and Armisen are the breakout stars

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Having jettisoned some of the funnier cast members in a budget slash (goodbye, clever Chris Parnell; so long, Horatio Sanz — your stolid presence in Amy Poehler's great ''Rick! Rick! Rick!'' sketches will be missed), the 32nd season of Saturday Night Live is playing out like a MADtv parody of SNL, with blandos like Jason Sudeikis and Bill Hader sucking the air out of nearly every sketch.

The MVPs are Poehler (who did a thorough evisceration of Nancy Grace on Oct. 7, all the more impressive given the fact that not one of her lines was funny) and, more surprisingly, Fred Armisen, who'd spent last season looking wistful whenever he wasn't doing his exhausted Prince impersonation. But Poehler and Armisen were fantastic in a series of taped ''New York City Stories'' on Oct. 7, with dead-on impressions of odd couplings like Martin Scorsese (Armisen) and Rosie Perez (Poehler), and Yoko Ono (Poehler) and Fran Lebowitz (Armisen), talking to the camera about what makes Manhattan great. Too bad none of their characters could have included SNL in that category.