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Hero and Villain of the Week: Shauna Hunt and Saturday Night Live
Every week, Toronto is filled with Heroes and Villains. These are their stories.
Hero of the Week: CityNews Reporter Shauna Hunt
Trolls are the worst. It’s one thing when they’re at a safe distance in a comment section that makes your eyes roll, but what if they showed up to your workplace, IRL, and shouted sexual harassing language directed at you while you worked in public?
That’s exactly what happened to CityNews reporter Shauna Hunt as she did a live hit from TFC’s first home game of the season. Most people would ignore the idiots, and think, “No, I won’t feed these trolls.”
Hunt reacted differently. She confronted the misogynistic douchebags, and called on them to justify their behaviour. Not satisfied with the, “It’s just hilarious,” defence offered by the knuckle-draggers, she continued to push them, and showed their bad behaviour as legitimately destructive.
It is not easy to stand up to this kind of idiocy. But when someone like Hunt does it, and confronts real-life trolls on their real-life acts of violence, then we’re all better off.
Villain of the Week: Saturday Night Live
Last Saturday, live from New York, the Not-Ready-for-Prime-Time players and guest host Reese Witherspoon performed a sketch about the inability to draw the prophet Muhammad during a Pictionary-type game show. For viewers of This Hour Has 22 Minutes, the sketch may have seemed familiar.
In January, the Canadian sketch show featured a skit with the same conceit, many of the same lines, comedic beats, and even the same numbers. The resemblance is uncanny. Granted, different writers often independently approach subjects in similar ways, but in this instance the degree to which the SNL skit seems to follow THH22M stretches credulity. It was nothing short of full-blown plagiarism.
SNL owes THH22M and writer Jeremy Woodcock (a Torontoist alumnus, and noted Urbane Explorer) an apology. They should be ashamed to lift a sketch note for note, and should take the appropriate steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again.