Read the FCC’s Crank Mail About Saturday Night Live
Is it a crime to take the Lord’s name in vain on TV? Someone in Davidson, North Carolina, seems to think so, judging from a list of citizen complaints about Saturday Night Live submitted to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from January 2023 to February 2024.
“Someone on Saturday night live said God’s name in vain!!!!” the viewer complained. “This is illegal on network tv!!!!”
One viewer from Easton, Pennsylvania groaned that Saturday Night Live showed images of “a young man doing cocaine with a spoon,” helpfully including a YouTube link of the offending skit.
“This is highly inappropriate. It exposes minors as well as other viewers to illicit drug use. It shows how to use the drug, what form it comes in, and where it is usually consumed,” the viewer wrote. “This is cannot [sic] be good for people. SNL and comedy should be funny but this is crass. What next? Shooting heroin, smoking crack on SNL?”
An incoherent, rambling complaint sent from Woodland Hills, California ended with the claim that the musician “Maxx Morando looks like a rapist, a racist, and a sexist pig.”
The complaints were obtained by Brooke Germain, an editor at The Nevada Sagebrush, under the Freedom of Information Act and posted to the public records platform MuckRock.
The FCC noted 20 complaints about Saturday Night Live in total, 19 of them about “indecency” and one about poorly timed closed captions. In total, the commission received 2,440 television indecency complaints in 2023. That’s a far cry from the days of the Parents Television Council’s mass campaigns more than a decade ago, which sometimes generated 179,997 complaints in a single month.
Some of the complaints about Saturday Night Live focused on specific episodes. Six viewers claimed that a December 9 sketch mocking the congressional hearings over campus antisemitism was making light of a serious issue. Two viewers huffed that a parody of the Oscars red carpet show was encouraging anti-Irish racism.
Other complaints were less specific. “Tired of seeing violence being portrayed as funny in todays [sic] climate when a new mass shooting happens everyday,”
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