The SNL Premiere Goes From Bad To Worse, With Allegations Of Blatant Plagiarism Being Levied Against Them Now. And It's Pretty Cut and Dry
(Shout out to the king of Detroit Chris Castellani for pointing this one out to me.)
PopcultureTV -Saturday Night Live was once again accused of plagiarizing a creator's sketch. During this weekend's Season 48 premiere, the long-running NBC series included a sketch featuring parodies of the Charmin toilet paper bears. It was one of the highlights of the rocky episode, but it turned out to be very similar to a sketch filmmaker Joel Haver published on YouTube in July.
In the sketches, the parents' son wants to do something more than just clean his behind with soft toilet paper. They dream of going into musical theater and becoming dancers, and they both shock their father. The SNL sketch goes on a bit longer than Haver's animated film, showing the father eventually convinced to allow his son to study dancing after he shows off his moves with a friend.
Haver's fans thought something was up with the SNL sketch. Many ran to a subreddit devoted to the filmmaker and wondered if they all thought the same thing.
In the cases where SNL has been accused of plagiarism in the past, the sketches are usually years old and from comedians who may not be well known nationally. This case is different because Haver's sketch is less than four months old. Haver also has a huge following, with over 1.68 million YouTube subscribers, 21,000 Twitter followers, and over 35,000 Instagram followers. Haver's own Charmin bears sketch has over 1.38 million views. Haver also drew attention just last month when he pulled one of his feature films from the web.
Yesterday I covered the SNL premiere which aired this weekend on Saturday Night featuring Miles Teller.
The episode altogether was bad. Even by present SNL standards. Now today accusations are flying around that some of the material appearing in it was lifted from other videos on the internet.
Here is the original video in question, produced by Joel Haver in July of this year. That's less than 3 months ago for those that can't do the math.
And here is the sketch Saturday Night Live broadcast this past weekend -
Yikes man.
Somebody is probably getting canned over this one.
But I'll actually argue it shouldn't be the year one writer who thought they could pass off somebody else's work they saw online earlier this summer as their own. It should be whoever is in charge of quality control over there at Rockefeller Center. Clearly not vetting ideas out and doing any background on not only the submissions, but on the people submitting them.
But there are some theories going around that SNL, hurting for ratings and a pulse as bad as they are, are now whoring themselves out in the form of sponsored sketches. Yah. Allegedly companies are forking over money to the show in exchange for incorporating them into the material in hopes of getting a sketch to go viral on social media after airing. Not a bad idea. Kinda sleazy? Yah. But marketing favors the resourceful.
But what's even crazier is this wasn't the only instance in the episode that people are accusing the show of stealing ideas.
Nope.
There was another (possibly) sponsored sketch from the new social media app "BeReal" that was again, had an idea either blatantly lifted from another creator's idea, or the company saw it, loved it, claimed it as their own, and submitted it to SNL as original and SNL did no diligence and ran it.
Here is the SNL one aired Saturday with Miles Teller -
and here is the original one from Tik Tok'ers Brandon Cavillo and King Bach.
It's one thing for the show to lack humor and originality and suck. It's another for it to lack humor and originality, steal from those it finds funny and original, and still suck.
p.s. -