‘Saturday Night Live’ re-watch: ‘The Miley Cyrus Show’ still can’t save Justin Bieber

While there are some good episodes of “Saturday Night Live” that become either better or worse over time, it’s very hard for a bad edition to suddenly become good upon multiple viewings. The only real exceptions to this rule are when you happened to be in a bad mood when you first watched the show, and then you suddenly find yourself enjoying things when you come in with a different mindset.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen in re-watching the show hosted by Justin Bieber. Much as we said in the original review, the problems with this edition of the show are twofold. Bieber didn’t seem natural enough in some of the skits (almost to a point where he was a little too desperate to look cool), and the show didn’t know what to do with him. It was strange for a show that has used Justin Timberlake so well, but the teen pop star was largely just used for sketches where he was playing himself or something that was a reference to someone either close to him or in the news. One example? The typically-funny “Miley Cyrus Show,” which was largely used used for an apology over some photos of him with pot.

The other thing that possibly hurts this episode of the show upon second viewing even more than most is that Bieber has taken a number of hits in the press from almost every direction over his attitude and some of his antics. We don’t know the guy, so we can’t say if any of it is justified or not; however, these sort of stories really weren’t coming out when he was first bursting on the music scene, and he was presented as this likable underdog who had gone from singing on YouTube in a small town in Ontario to being one of the biggest stars on the planet.

Bieber could still turn it around, since Timberlake was not always the universally-liked performer with the knockout sense of humor; unfortunately, we can’t really say the same thing about the show. You can watch the episode again tonight on NBC, or you can just do so below so long as you’re located in America.

If you want to read our re-watch of the Adam Levine, episode, you can do so here. Meanwhile, we’ll have an all-new edition next week hosted by Melissa McCarthy.

Photo: NBC