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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: November 10, 2012
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Saturday Night Live, “Anne Hathaway / Rihanna” (season 38, episode 7). [Stream on Hulu.]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: As one-two punches go on Saturday Night Live, Anne Hathaway and Rihanna in the fall of 2012 was up there with the best of them. Hathaway was there to promote the movie that would eventually win her an Academy Award, Les Miserables. Rihanna was there to promote her new single, “Diamonds.” Each of them had one moment of brilliance in this episode. For Hathaway, it was the “Homeland” sketch, where she put on her best Claire Danes cry-face and utterly nailed the foibles of what was then Showtime’s massively buzzy show. It’s one of those cases where SNL digs into a popular cultural artifact and gets at every little nuance, finding things to make fun of it for that we hadn’t even thought of. Like how Damien Lewis has the world’s smallest mouth. Or Mandy Patinkin’s cool and incredibly specific vocal patterns. Hathaway was merciless as Claire Danes, though. Her darting eyes and massive productions of making cry-faces were massively on-point and savagely funny.
But that was just the beginning. Rihanna was there to sing “Diamonds.” In this new era of Saturday Night Live, where you watch the sketches piecemeal the next morning on Hulu, the musical performances often fall by the wayside. It is the rare musical performance that gets talked about at all on the next day; most of them are forgotten by the time they finish. They also generally don’t sound super great? This may be a personal thing, but the sound design on those performances, from an end-user’s perspective, is often abysmal. How often does an artist sound measurably worse on SNL than they do on albums or in concert? But this Rihanna performance was the glorious exception to all of that.
Who’s to say what inspired Rihanna to devise a clip-art-based, screen-saver-chic visual presentation to unfold behind her while she performed the song. But it was easily the most memorable thing to happen in an SNL musical performance since Will Ferrell showed up as his cowbell-clanging character during a Queens of the Stone Age performance.
This was easily the peak of DGAF Rihanna, at least on the national stage. And it’s still an all-timer when we talk about musical artists on SNL.
