"Live from New York, it's Saturday Night!" Every Saturday night for the past 30 years we've heard that on NBC, and this year began the same way. Last Saturday night was the first episode of the 28th season of Saturday Night Live, hosted for the first time by the ever-popular Matt Damon. The featured musical guest was Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.

The show's ratings, regardless of Damon's and Springsteen's collective popularity, were down. According to USA Today, overnight meter ratings indicated that this year's SNL premiere scored a 6.5 rating and a 16 percent share of the audience. This is a decline of nearly 15 percent from 2001's premiere, which followed the attacks of Sept. 11 and featured former mayor of New York City Rudolph Giuliani in a brief special tribute to the fire fighters and police officers of New York City.

Ratings may have been down in general, but I sense that ratings probably dropped off significantly as the night went on. The show started out with weak material: a sketch involving Dick Cheney (as played by Darrell Hammond) "riding" a missile to Iraq. Because Will Ferrell, who used to play President George W. Bush, has left the show, an impersonation of the president did not appear on the air. (Spokespeople for the show say that a new impersonation is in the works. Heaven help us.)

The weak material continued throughout the 90-minute program. There were too many dead moments for me to list them all, but some moments of the show were so non-funny that I feel like NBC cheated the entire audience out of their Saturday night.

Some of the worst moments of the show included the terribly written and almost painful-to-watch "Britney and Justin's dance-off" (which could have been funny, had it been written better). Also nauseating ­ and incredibly annoying ­ was the "Hispanic comedian" featured during "Weekend Update" who was most decidedly not funny. This particular bit got progressively worse thanks to the performer's inability to look at the correct camera.

Also horrible was a badly written "Dr. Phil" parody, which didn't present anything approaching a semblance of humor. However my vote for the worst sketch of the night has to go to one of the final sketches, which featured Damon as a government scientist who was supposedly given millions of dollars to invent a "sex robot" (this consisted of Chris Kattan inside of a rolling garbage can with a hole cut into one side). As hard as he tried, even the 32-year- old Damon couldn't recover this stinker of a skit.

Of course there were a few highlights of the show, including "Brian Fellow's Safari Planet," which is generally funny because of its flat-out stupidity. One of the funniest bits was TV Fun House's "The Smurfette Show," a direct (and hilarious) parody of The Anna Nicole Show. Another bright spot was the "Matt Damon, meet Matt Damon" sketch in which Damon is chewed out by a doctor named Matt Damon for "stealing his identity." However, even these sketches seemed to lack enthusiasm ­ primarily because the audience just didn't laugh at them.

On the whole, Damon's talent was wasted on poorly written sketches. His impression of Hannibal Lecter was impressive and dead-on, but wasted on a horridly written and poorly executed "Hannibal Lecter at College" sketch. It was obvious that he was pouring all of his energy into all of his characters on the show, including his impersonation of Axel Rose during a "commercial" for "Donatella Versace Pockets" (which also included a fantastic impersonation of Rosie O'Donnell by Horatio Sanz). On the whole, SNL's writers cheated Damon by giving him weak sketches to perform in, and the audience failed to support the show as a coherent whole.