TOW #10 - Saturday Night Live: Westworld

Last night, Saturday Night Live aired a skit which imitated HBO’s “Westworld” in order to parody Anderson Cooper and CNN’s way of delivering news. In the skit, there are five participants led in conversation by Anderson Cooper (played by Alex Moffat). In the skit, the writers used parody, repetition, and symbolism to demonstrate CNN’s flawed news coverage. Anderson Cooper starts out by telling the group that Donald Trump had recently called for top secret security of his kids. Each respondent shared their opinion (all were against it) claiming that this was as of yet the worst thing that Trump had done. Anderson Cooper brings up another point about the KKK, to which the respondents repeat their exact same lines, just at a faster pace, claiming that now this was the worst thing Trump had done so far (including the incident from seconds earlier). This happens a few more times until Anderson Cooper begins to realize that everyone was just repeating themselves. All of a sudden, everyone freezes and two mechanics come out and replace the conscious Anderson Cooper with a new, lifeless Anderson Cooper (this one played by Beck Bennett) and the skit continues as before.

The skit was created as a parody to first off remake “Westworld,” but more so to mock news sources like CNN. Saturday Night Live is obviously a satirical program, and this would not be one of their skits without some satirical strategies like parody. Within this parody, the writers of the skit used repetition to show that the news providers don’t come up with much new content. It is all repeated, over and over. In the skit, the participants all responded negatively to Donald Trump’s actions, but then moved on and accepted them. Some of the things Trump had been said to have done were horrible, yet they were forgotten by the anchors. It goes to show that news anchors almost blindly read their lines. In the end, it turns out that all of the characters are robots, and this symbolism further depicts the news anchors as mechanical. If they were just plain news anchors (if we never saw the robotic side to them), there would not be such a great emphasis on their (lack of) qualities. It really highlights the lack of creativity in the news anchors and programs. Through the pure repetition of similar events and the symbolism of news anchors as robots, ultimately, I think that SNL was successful in bringing light to the faults of news programs like CNN.