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For Sunday night's reunion show, SNL brought back the key players of "The Californians" running skit — Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Fred Armisen, Kenan Thompson — and added SNL's original Valley Girl, Laraine Newman, plus Bradley Cooper, Taylor Swift and Betty White. There are plenty of SoCal freeways and streets name-checked, plus a mention of Fry's in Burbank and a pregnancy accompanied by a wish that the baby is delivered "at Cedars-Sinai Hospital, at Beverly and San Vicente." For fans of "The Californians," this is pretty good.
The SNL reunion show itself was a ratings hit, though it sounded laborious to sit through. To pretty much everyone's surprise (or so I surmise), Miley Cyrus performed a creditable version of Paul Simon's "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover." Tina Fey and Amy Poehler came back to reprise Weekend Update with original cast member Jane Curtin, who got off maybe the best line: "I used to be the only pretty blond woman reading the fake news. Now there's a whole network devoted to that." (She means Fox News.) My personal runner-up was Fey's quip that in addition to cast members from the show's history, they also had one of the original producers: "cocaine."
