A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

HE SAVED THE FRANCHISE:  James Andrew Miller on Eddie Murphy, SNL, and his return to 30 Rock this Sunday:

The running start is, remember, Eddie is 19. Remember that when he first came on, I don’t think, quite frankly, there were too many people in the executive halls who understood what they had with him. I do think you’ve got to give Ebersol and a lot of the writers a lot of credit because they went heavy with Eddie. He carried the show. This is not, he would appear once and you’d never see him again. He took that show on his back and ran with it. I think that, when you think about, not only his versatility but so many sketches that became iconic in the SNL world: James Brown’s hot tub, Mr. Robinson, they were sensational. I think a lot of people were tuning in to see him. And because SNL is such a collaborative group, [this was the only time in] history of the show where a specific cast member has had that kind of wattage around him, where there was such a disparity between the star quality with one cast member and the rest of the cast. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler and Will Ferrell and Phil Hartman, they were all really great cast members, but they had other great cast members with them.