As Saturday Night Live continues to try and top their phenomenal run last year, the show has hit a couple of speed bumps along the way. One big misfire came with the airing of a controversial spoof sketch involving a pervy Safelite AutoGlass employee irked the real-life company and caused them to publicly condemn the sketch. It appears SNL attempted to repair its relationship with the company by trying to erase the sketch from existence by not only keeping it off YouTube and other video sites, but also by replacing the sketch in the episode it aired in.
This weekend's Saturday Night Live episode repeat, which was the one hosted by Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot, had the offending Safelite sketch completely cut from the airing. What was seen instead? Saturday Night Live replaced the controversial Safelite sketch with a rap parody featuring Gal Gadot that was cut for time from the original episode. Additionally, SNL removed the skit from its Hulu and YouTube pages, and NBC is aggressively taking down any unauthorized versions of the sketch that pop up on the Internet.
As for an official reason why NBC is continuing to take action by removing the sketch is unknown. Safelite, who is likely happy to see the sketch disappear, released a statement to Decider, noting that they did not specifically ask NBC to erase the sketch from existence, and the company also wasn't notified of the decision.
When the SNL sketch featuring Safelite first aired, we expressed our disappointment with how it negatively portrayed our people. It was SNL's decision to remove the content, and they have not shared their reasons behind that decision.
At the time of the Saturday Night Live sketch's first airing, Safelite took to Twitter to condemn the sketch for its highly negative and creepy approach. In the parody, Beck Bennett's character was too spot on in resembling one of the technicians that appear in Safelite's actual commercials, and the company obviously wasn't a fan of how little differentiation there was, nor the way in which the faux employee exhibited predatory behavior with a customer. At the time, Safelite commented that while it could take a joke, SNL had taken things one step too far by taking such direct aim at its employees.
Saturday Night Live is all new this Saturday, December 2nd ,with Lady Bird star Saoirse Ronan as guest host and U2 as the musical guest. It airs on NBC at 11:30 p.m. ET. For more on upcoming programming, be sure to visit our fall premiere guide and midseason premiere guide for a glimpse of what's on the horizon for television. For a look at a heaping helping of shows that didn't manage to escape 2017 without being canceled, visit our cancellation guide.
To check out that controversial SNL sketch before the guy posting it on his Twitter account gets sued into oblivion, head over to the next page.
