Going Where The Censors Can’t Reach You

Last weekend, NBC censors drew the line on a bawdy Saturday Night Live sketch, repeatedly bleeping a certain word as it went out over the air. It was hardly the first time SNL has gone up against the censors, but this time, the show’s creators had a Plan B. The sketch was immediately posted, sans bleeps, on NBC’s website, and on YouTube.com. “In the process, Saturday Night Live appears to have become the first scripted comedy on a broadcast network to use the Web to make an end-run around the prying eyes of both its internal censors and those of the Federal Communications Commission, whose jurisdiction over “Saturday Night Live” effectively ends at the Web frontier.”