SNL critiques vacuous TV news shows with a clever Westworld twist


Saturday Night Live skewered vacuous TV news shows with a clever parody of HBO's epic robot drama Westworld. The skit begins normally enough on the set of Anderson Cooper 360, where Cooper and a variety of talking heads settle into a too-familiar routine. As Cooper announces a breaking news item about President-elect Donald Trump, his panelists weigh in:
"Okay, you know what? This is not normal."
"This is crazy!"
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"This isn't like [some other Trump scandal]."
"This is when we in the media have to draw the line!"
"Mmkay, can we just remember that most Americans voted for Trump?"
"Actually, they didn't, Kayleigh!"
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The first time around, the answers come off as a standard SNL critique of cable news. But as Cooper shares each new story the analysis takes a repetitive turn. Watch the whole sketch below. Bonnie Kristian
Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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