Generally the last sketch of the evening is the weakest, but not so for the season finale, which featured Mick Jagger performing a blues number he had written about the upcoming presidential election, with Jeff Beck on guitar. The song briefly took on Mitt Romney (“you better not let him cut your hair,” Jagger advised), but he switched gears in the second verse to wonder who’s going to win the election in November. He played coy and didn’t give a prediction, but he did say “shit” on network television, so I supposed everybody wins?

“This hate speech haven is the creation of frat boy guru Douchebag Chopra.” That’s right, Stefon came back for the season finale of SNL to give us nightmares the scoop on the coolest places to go in New York City over the summer.

It’s a night for nostalgia — given that Andy Samberg may also leave the show after this year, it was fitting that the final “Digital Short” for the season was a reprisal of the well-known “Lazy Sunday” short from earlier in the sketch’s history. The pop culture references were updated (“love you like McAdams loves Gosling” was changed to “like McAdams loves Channing”) but the concept was the same, with Samberg and former cast member Chris Parnell doing all kinds of normal bro stuff like going to brunch and seeing Sister Act: The Musical.

The season finale’s breakneck pace meant that the Digital Short (“Lazy Sunday 2″) segued directly into a sketch with Kenan Thompson playing Al Sharpton on “Politics Nation,” and it suffered in comparison. Sharpton interviewed JP Morgan’s Colin McKechnie, played by Mick Jagger — wow, the show is sure getting its money’s worth with him — about the billions of dollars misplaced by the bank earlier this week.

Mick Jagger’s comedic abilities are limited, but opportunities to make fun of his image are infinite, and the sketch in which Jagger played a shy insurance salesman stuck at a karaoke bar on a business trip was a great chance for the show to exploit some of them. First Fred Armisen went up to the microphone and did a respectable cover of “Start Me Up,” complete with many of Jagger’s trademark preening dance moves and bizarre faces. Mick Jagger the insurance salesman was not impressed.

Mick Jagger was in high spirits during his opening monologue on Saturday Night Live, and though the jokes were unremarkable he delivered them with panache (and everything seems better when it comes from someone wearing an awesome gold jacket). He admitted to being his own favorite Rolling Stone very sincerely, and to being huge fans of the Food Fighters (with whom he’ll be performing later tonight) somewhat less so.

“You know what they say about the Finger Lakes – if you can only squeeze in one finger on your first visit, just relax.” The season finale of Saturday Night Live is clearly going to be all class, if Fred Armisen’s line in the first sketch of the night is to be believed. The recurring Lawrence Welk Show sketch was livened up by Jon Hamm doing a delightfully heinous Italian accent in counterpoint to the usual musical stylings of Abby Elliot, Nasim Pedrad, Vanessa Bayer and an, uh, developmentally challenged Kristen Wiig.

This week’s episode of Mad Men gave us one example of pettiness and venality after another. It was a reminder that even after following these characters through a number of years, many of them are stuck in the same adolescent pattern in which they started, and probably will be forever. It’s a big week on [...]

The View panel had E.L. James, author of the steamy trilogy of novels that begins with Fifty Shades Of Grey, on the show Friday morning to talk about what “inspired” her series. She was introduced by clear fangirl Sherri Shepherd, who asked her “what is it about this book that is making people so crazy?”

Howard Stern was on The View for the first time ever today, ostensibly to promote his new role as a judge on America’s Got Talen. Rather than plug his new show, however, he seemed more interesting in fixing up the co-hosts, even the ones who are already married. He had the brilliant idea to set Barbara Walters up with Charlie Rose, and Elisabeth Hasselbeck up with himself, but what he was most interested in was finding a man for Whoopi Goldberg.

The View panel got a bit heated while discussing the case of a 58-year-old woman who was fired from her job after her employer discovered that she had been arrested for shoplifting and failed to disclose the arrest on her job application. The fly in the ointment is that the arrest occurred forty years ago, when she was a teenager. Should an old record matter so much?

Just when you thought Pete Campbell’s life couldn’t get any sadder, and he couldn’t get any grosser, he sleeps with his commuter buddy Howard’s wife, played by Alexis Bledel (it was so weird to see Rory Gilmore in the Mad Men universe, and it didn’t get any less weird as the episode went on). In typical Pete fashion, he believes this is the start of a relationship, and calls and harasses Rory Gilmore at home, until he finally gets Howard to bring him home after work one night to talk about his life insurance policy.

It’s the story that wouldn’t die — the so-called “Tanning Mom” from New Jersey has hit back at critics of her sunless tanning habit, calling her detractors “fat, ugly and jealous.” Even though she seems like a great person, Elisabeth Hasselbeck felt compelled to defend her. When Whoopi Goldberg argued that the continuing interest in her stems from concerns about skin cancer, Hasselbeck retorted “People aren’t concerned about her, they’re worried about her parenting!”

Well, you can’t say that Rihanna didn’t make excellent use of the stage. For her second performance, she turned the space into some kind of harem in outer space, and was surrounded by female dancers wearing cargo pants and headscarves. Vocally, this performance of “Where Have You Been” was much stronger than “Birthday Cake/Talk That Talk,” and the total weirdness of the concept was certainly exciting.

Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Dictator” character, the star of his new movie, really wants to make sure that people see it. To that end, he appeared on “Weekend Update” to plug his film and, in particular, emphasize how well-reviewed it was. A.O. Scott and Roger Ebert loved it! Well, they had to be tortured first, but they came around.

>After facing accusations that she took her five-year-old kid into a tanning bed with her, the so-called “Tanning Mom” made an appearance on “Weekend Update” to tell her side of the story. She was played by Kristen Wiig in orange makeup that actually made her look better than her real-life counterpart, and was trailed by a cloud of smoke.

Rihanna has never been particularly shy about her choices, which might be why she decided to open her performance on Saturday Night Live with “Birthday Cake,” a song that received a lot of attention when it was revealed that ex Chris Brown appeared as a guest on the track. Mercifully, “Birthday Cake” segued into “Talk That Talk,” a relief because it’s actually an objectively terrible song, Chris Brown or no Chris Brown.

Saturday Night Live started out with “Fox and Friends,” featuring Taran Killam continuing to kill it with the cable news personality impressions as Steve Doocy. He was joined by Gretchen Carlson, played by Vanessa Bayer, and Brian Kilmeade, played by Bobby Moynihan. The topic for the episode, as is typical with “Fox & Friends,” was what Obama was doing wrong lately.

The View co-hosts got a little heated this morning over a new ad made by the Romney campaign accusing President Obama, of all things, of being “too cool.” They played the ad, which which leans heavily on the exploding problem of student loan debt, in all of its auto-tuned glory for the studio audience. Elisabeth Hasselbeck thought that the while “point of [the ad] is there, the delivery is off,” and she and Whoopi Goldberg agreed that the music could have been better.That was about the only thing that they agreed on!

Last night’s episode of Mad Men saw many of the characters, especially the women, trying on new roles, attempting to fit into them even if they were too baggy or burdensome. It’s a common theme on the show, but it was explored in particular depth in this episode, titled “Lazy Lazarus.”

Well, it wasn’t exactly a happy ending. The panel was talking about a scientist who claims to have pinpointed the erogenous zone in women known as the “G-spot,” which allowed the co-hosts to indulge in one of their favorite pastimes: being inappropriate. Whoopi Goldberg was affronted that there could only be one spot (why couldn’t she have spots lettered A through H, she demanded?), while Barbara Walters was skeptical that the guy had found it at all, and Sherri Shepherd and Elisabeth Hasselbeck looked generally horrified by all of the sex talk.

The decades-old missing persons case of Etan Patz, who went missing in SoHo in 1979, has been reopened after authorities discovered hair and a possible blood stain in a basement near the location where Patz is thought to have disappeared. His case was the genesis for the program that put photos of missing children on milk cartons, but Whoopi Goldberg wondered if we should go further and start microchipping our children — after all, we do it to our pets!

In this episode, only two of Mad Men’s main characters actually take LSD, but the whole hour feels like a bad trip. There are three separate journeys undergone this week, but at their root is the same sense of dissatisfaction and of seeking an alternate reality as a way to combat real-life unhappiness. The episode unfolds over the course of two days, though it doesn’t become clear that the characters are traveling through the same amount of time repeatedly until about half way through the hour.

The cast of HBO’s “Girls,” which has received praise and criticism across the internet this week after its premiere on Sunday night, appeared this morning on the The View to talk about their newfound fame. Creator and director Lena Dunham appeared with Allison Williams and Zosia Mamet to talk about the show’s frank depiction of 20-something girls struggling to make it in New York City. Naturally, Barbara Walters wanted to talk about the sex.

A certain spreadsheet has been making the rounds online, and even got picked up on The View’s radar, made by a man who was dating twelve women (most of whom he had met on Match.com) and needed a way to keep them all organized. Naturally, he made an extremely detailed spreadsheet detailing his contact with them that included physical and personality traits, not all of them flattering. His fatal mistake came when he emailed the spreadsheet to one of the girls, who promptly forwarded it to all of her friends, who sent it to their friends, and here we are.