It can easily be said that NBC News has enough authenticity problems with Brian Williams. But can’t anyone at NBC ask someone else at 30 Rock to provide a comment or explanation for Saturday Night Live’s May 9 draw-the-prophet-Muhammad skit seems awfully plagiarized from the Canadian Broadcasting Company comedy show 22 Minutes?
The New York Daily News reports NBC had no comment on the “nearly identical” skit, but that this is par for the ‘SNL’ course:
Last October, the show was hit with a similar accusation that they ripped off a "Proud Mary" sketch performed earlier at the Los Angeles-based The Groundlings improv theatre.
"Over the years I have seen MANY, MANY sketches flat out stolen from my friends by Saturday Night Live," Groundlings teacher Ian Gary wrote on Facebook at the time.
"Nearly verbatim. Word for word... And everyone in our community goes 'Oh man. That sucks.' and nobody says anything because I guess SNL is still some dream for some people or they don't want to get involved, or a million other reasonable things that stop people from standing up for each other when things are blatantly wrong."
It's not like the Peacock Network has never touched on this ethical problem. NBC’s Today has discussed plagiarism when the subject of controversy was the book Fifty Shades of Grey (2012), the HBO TV series True Detective (2014), a Burger King man-on-the-street commercial (2014), and the hit Robin Thicke song Blurred Lines (2015).
NBC News shows usually love splaying 'SNL' skits all over the news with cross-promotional bliss, like when Hillary Clinton recently announced her presidential campaign.
Compare the NBC and CBC skits side by side. CBC:
Then NBC (a "writer" got paid for this work?):
