Syfy hires Will Forte and Heidi Gardner to do Weekend Update, but now it's with cartoon aliens
Look, let’s be very clear: We’re always happy to see Will Forte get more work. (R.I.P. Last Man On Earth, MacGruber, and the SNL potato chip NASA guy.) And current Saturday Night Live cast member Heidi Gardner is a consistent treat. But still: There’s something a little on the nose in the news that Syfy has just hired the pair to star in a Lorne Michaels-produced fake news show, except this time the fake news anchors are aliens, instead of Michael Che.
First draftily titled Alien News Desk, the series is a production of Michaels’ Broadway Video, along with SNL producer Erik Kenward and Weekend Update head writer Dennis McNicholas, who’ll serve as showrunner, so, yeah, this is all pretty transparent. Forte and Gardner—who, again, are funny, and will probably make this funny—will be voicing alien news anchors Drexx and Tuva, respectively, as the series “covers up-to-the-minute news and commentary about the universe’s most baffling species—the inscrutable Humans of Planet Earth.”
Even more baffling: Syfy is planning this as its companion piece to its recent acquisition of the complete run of Futurama, a show that already did this exact kind of comedy about as well as anybody was ever probably going to be able to do it.
Hey, Morbo, what’s your take on this?
Okay, well, fair enough.