1995-96 was a turnaround; there are a few dry spells (especially the Tom Arnold show with the godawful "Brainiac" sketch), but the March through May run is probably SNL's last true hot streak. The next year kind of felt like a drop in quality, though.

The only thing that assured me Farley wasn't going to drop dead during the show was that I was watching on a tape-delay when it aired.

I think McKean co-wrote that one with David Mandel. I wonder if McKean was also responsible for the commercial where he played a mayor trying to attract anti-abortion protestors to his small, conservative town (with several "non-alcoholic Christian discos").

I remember watching the season live. The Sarah Jessica Parker show I missed and videotaped but didn't watch until at least four years later. I remember being struck by how absolutely joyless that particular show was.

Besides the 1984-85 giants montage (by Charlex), there's one particularly egregious omission: the back half of 1979-80 had this really painstakingly made montage comprised of numerous hand-colored Baskin stills put together in a sort of animation, featuring the cast and writers at a bar. (The first half of the season…

In the Taschen SNL coffee table book, there's a picture of Anderson and Sublette (or, as the SNL message boards call them, Anderlette) talking to Kristen Wiig while rehearsing a Gilly sketch, so it looks like that character was theirs (though I have also seen it attributed to Paula Pell). They also wrote Secret Word…

I think that's a collaboration between Cecily and Colin Jost.

If the premise is essentially "Cecily talks in a funny voice" or something to do with live animals, it's more than likely to be an Anderlette sketch.

My interest in the show this season has waned to the point where it's a struggle to keep paying attention to most of the sketches.

She writes a lot with James Anderson and Kent Sublette, who seem to specialize in intentionally annoying (and two-dimensional) characters. Before Cecily started working with them, they came up with a bunch of wacky characters for Kristen Wiig and Fred Armisen.

Trouble is, one of the head writers is Kenan Thompson's biggest champion/collaborator (Bryan Tucker). I still can't get over his defense of Thompson in Slate; the man is seriously deluded about his talent.

This season has been incredibly frustrating because the new hires are all purely cosmetic, intended to distract from how the show's in a creative drought. Are they contractually required to do "song-and-dance-ologues", game show sketches and talk show sketches in so many shows a season? Not to mention that the new…

Robin dies while buillfighting.

I'm calling it: we don't learn The Mother's name until we see her headstone.

I could see it, although I think Saget-Ted mentions Barney and Robin a few times with "To this day…".

It still seems like Bob Saget's disembodied voice interacts with them enough to make it seem like Ted's still around (and not a video will). Besides, if Ted were dead, that would just make the Mother's backstory all the more brutal.

Season 6 and 7 have some very emotionally devastating shows in there.

The one plot point I'm most curious about is how Robin finds out about the reason Ted and Victoria ended their relationship. They teased it at the end of "The Autumn of Break-Ups", and it doesn't seem like it ends up being a welcome development.

I'd like to see what How I Met Your Mother would be like if played for gritty realism. It would be an unflinching look at a group of alcoholics with various emotional issues.

Most of them aired on a Canadian cable channel about 15 years ago, although I found a few copies from original airings.