Review: NBC's 'Maya and Marty' makes everything old feel even older

How many more SNLs does NBC need?

There’s the original Saturday Night Live, of course, still going strong under the guiding hands of its creator, Lorne Michaels. Fine, but then there’s also The Tonight Show and Late Night, produced by Michaels, who installed SNL veterans as hosts and imbued the shows with an SNL sensibility.

And now, on Tuesday nights this summer, we have Maya & Marty (10 ET/PT, ** out of four), a new NBC series starring Maya Rudolph and Martin Short that promised to revive variety and instead simply reworked and relocated SNL. No wonder they were hesitant to tell us what they were doing in advance: They're simply doing what they’ve already done, and who’s going to get very excited about that?

Granted, on a network summer night, even a show that feels this old counts as new. Still, it would have been nice to know ahead of time that the show we were going to see would look pretty much precisely like what we've seen, from the look of the sets and the mix of pre-taped parodies  and skits done in front of an audience, to appearances by Larry David, Jimmy Fallon, Tom Hanks and musical guest Miley Cyrus.

Yes, there’s something to be said for doing one thing but doing it very well. There’s less to be said for franchising one thing all over the schedule. It's only a matter of time before NBC moves SNL to Chicago, and the whole network becomes one show.

A few of the bits were funny: Short reviving his fatuous interviewer Jiminy Glick, with David; Rudolph as the Civil War’s worst letter writer. Others, in that time-honored, SNL tradition, fell flat or went nowhere, which was the fate of every skit involving the show's other SNL transfer, Kenan Thompson. Nothing felt fresh or alive  — a problem that could at least be mitigated if the hosts stopped pushing and performing for a few minutes and allowed us to believe we were seeing them as they truly are.

Oh, and who did those hosts announce as next week’s guests? Tina Fey and Steve Martin.

No, that won’t feel like SNL at all.