Do the New ‘Saturday Night Live’ Credits Shun Brooklyn?
If you’ve been watching the new season of Saturday Night Live, you may have noticed a little change to the show’s opening credits. That’s to be expected: Every year, the credits are adjusted to reflect the comings and goings of cast members, the players shown happily carousing on the streets of New York City at night. But the new credits, save for a split-second shot of the Brooklyn Bridge and Taran Killam at the Brooklyn Night Bazaar, are very Manhattan-centric. And that has some Brooklynites, including Borough President Eric Adams, steamed.
Previous iterations of the SNL opening had more shots of Brooklyn, including a shot of Manhattan from Brooklyn and a longer clip of cyclists on the Bridge. But this one, save for those few measly moments, shunned Brooklyn entirely.
“The borough comes alive at night, and it’s only fitting that ‘Saturday Night Live’ acknowledge that,” Eric Adams told the Wall Street Journal. Cutting out the borough means that the intro is “missing the flavor of New York…the mix of all the cultures where finally New York City has gotten it right in one borough, where no one is living in the boundaries of one label. Nothing is more New Yorker than that.”
The Journal also interviewed other Brooklyn boosters disappointed in the choice, including CUNY media studies professor Katherine Fry, an unabashed pro-Brooklyn denizen. “It’s annoying for people who live in Brooklyn because we know we are the much hipper borough in New York,” she said. Look, you said it, not us.
A representative from the show only confirmed that, indeed, the intro had been updated, and not that there was seething anti-Brooklyn bias going on in the cutting room. And yes, we acknowledge that SNL is a national comedy show, and therefore it’s just in it to get stock footage that symbolizes the city to a network audience. Look, bagels! A bridge! Buildings! But next time, head on over to King’s County to have Vanessa Bayer horse around in front of the camera. The sake over here is just fine.
It’s worth noting that the other boroughs of New York got equally shafted in the promo, but no one from Staten Island or Queens seems much bothered by the exclusion. Or at least, their borough presidents don’t.