Well, it’s been a big week for Growing Pains news. Unfortunately, this latest development is of the sadder variety, as we’ve lost another member of the Growing Pains family. It was announced today that veteran actor, Bill Erwin passed away at his home on December 28th, at the admirable age of 96. You may know him best as Sid Fields from Seinfeld, the old man whom Jerry volunteers to assist, a role for which Erwin was nominated for an Emmy. However, long before Seinfeld, Erwin had already made an indelible mark on us from his many appearances on Growing Pains. Over six seasons Erwin appeared on the sitcom eight different times as seven different characters, from Buzz the plumber to Lloyd the fumigator to the school janitor (he was the go-to old man for thankless blue-collar jobs, evidently). He was like Bruce Willis in North, or Rachel Dratch in the first season of 30 Rock, there whenever the Seavers needed him, in whatever guise was most appropriate. We’ve seen him in many roles since then, some he shot after, some he shot before, but, to us, he’ll always be the old man from Growing Pains.
And here he is as Bubs the mechanic, from the Growing Pains meta-episode “Meet the Seavers:”
And if you watched Home Alone over Christmas (like we did a couple of times) you might also recognize Erwin as the old man in the Scranton airport who refuses to give up his plane tickets to Mrs. McCallister:
TV and film just lost a good one, that’s for sure.
[btw, not to be confused with Bill Irwin]
Amy Poehler returned to host the 36th season premiere of SNL this past week, but did it feel like she ever really left? Between her frequent appearances last season on the big show and her stint co-anchoring 
It was an up and down decade for Saturday Night Live, but then again it’s been an up and down 34 years for Saturday Night Live. The show started gangbusters in 2000, taking advantage of the 2000 election and perhaps becoming more relevant than it had at any point during the previous decade (media and communication majors and political scientists will be analyzing SNL‘s Gore-Bush debates for years to come, studying how the show interpreted the real events and how the sketches then in turn affected the election). Then the show kind of treaded water until the 2004 election when it once again made the best of the political fodder, although with the relatively benign John Kerry as a central character the political satire was not as entertaining or as incisive as 2000. But With a mostly new cast then the beginning of the decade the show returned to prominence in 2008, most notably mining the comedy goldmine that was the renegade Sarah Palin. However, although SNL’s strongest seasons were during the election years, the best sketches were scattered throughout the aughts, with a fair share of political material, but also crazy characters, inventive monologues, traditional bits and the now ubiquitous Digital Shorts. Here, in a particular but not necessarily meaningful order is a very subjective list of the top ten (and then some) Saturday Night Live sketches of the decade that was.*
Jumped The Snark 