Alec Baldwin got into a Twitter spat with Daniel D’Addario, Time’s television critic, Monday morning, claiming that Saturday Night Live’s apolitical stance on the presidential election was caused by “NBC execs.” D’Addario panned Saturday night’s episode, tweeted that the cold open was “mawkish,” and accused the show of maintaining an editorial viewpoint of “access-preserving false equivalency”:
D’Addario went on to excoriate Saturday Night Live for its election coverage all year, from the decision to have Donald Trump host to the false catharsis of last week’s cold open, which ended with Kate McKinnon saying they “can’t tell you who to vote for.”
Baldwin responded from the Twitter account for the Alec Baldwin Foundation, telling D’Addario, “You write about television, yet you know so little about how it really works.” He added that Saturday Night Live staff would like to endorse candidates but was stymied by NBC brass:
D’Addario asked the actor if he believed the show’s work was “beyond criticism,” reminded him that they’d let Trump host the show, and broadened his critique to include systemic issues:
It would be interesting to know more about the discussions among NBC and Saturday Night Live’s writers, actors, and producers, but future discussion of these issues may be slow in coming: According to D’Addario, Baldwin has blocked him on Twitter.
