'SNL' Season Premiere Doesn't Get Millennials

Marking one of its few missteps, Saturday Night Live took aim at Millennials during its Season 41 premiere. Under the guise of a new FOX TV show — though the real premise of the series was never truly revealed apart from the fact that it featured Millennials — it paraded a series of supposedly Millennial characters exhibiting "typical" traits of their generation. It was... not great.

First off, all of the supposedly typical Millennial traits were pretty obvious. They were all on their cell phones constantly, dressed in semi-creative outfits in contrast to their superiors' more businesslike, "leaned in" too quickly and asked for raises or leaves of absences too soon, and expected to receive them because they felt entitled. In other words, yawn. These are things people have been saying about that generation for years. Not only is it lazy, it's not particularly true. I mean, at this point, isn't everyone always on their cell phones all the time? Is that really particularly a young person's trait? And watching people take constant selfies and talk about how addicted they are to social media seems pretty stale by now. I'm not even sure SNL was parodying anything specific in the way the characters dressed — it was just grasping at straws.

Not only that, there was one part of the sketch where two people were talking about their sexuality (much to the disgust of older characters in earshot). One of them said she was "gender lazy," while the other said he identified as gay, but added that he only slept with women. That's pretty tone deaf for Saturday Night Live in 2015. I mean, by now we should all be pretty familiar with the fact that gender is personal, and it takes a lot of courage for people to speak about it, especially if it doesn't fit into typical gender norms. Making light of that is pretty tone-deaf.

Plus, Kate McKinnon was doing a voice and making a face I'd never heard from a human person, no matter what the age.

There's plenty to make fun of about Millennials, but Saturday Night Live needs to take another crack at it.

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Image: NBC