Alec Baldwin Can't Outdo Betty White

Saturday Night Live ended its 35th season last night with a record-tying 15th hosting gig by Alec Baldwin, who suffered by comparison to last week's scene-stealer, Betty White. "Baldwin hinted at it in his monologue," writes John Teti of the Onion A.V. Club—"after last week’s triumphant, hooray-for-everything Betty White extravaganza, this episode inevitably felt like the cast was playing out the string."

High points included the cold open, which got in a few solid shots at BP and Halliburton; the coke-bender-themed digital short; a school athletic awards sketch that "was essentially Alec Baldwin saying incredibly mean things about schoolchildren for three minutes"; and the return of "Nasim Pedrad as Bedelia, the teenager who thinks her parents are just the coolest." Low points included Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Check out the video above, in which Baldwin and Kristen Wiig flog a weird kitchen appliance, and click here for the Atlantic's pick of five high points.
(More Alec Baldwin stories.)