Vanessa Bayer made another appearance on Saturday Night Live as the precocious Laura Parsons, who stopped by Weekend Update to give a news report from a youngster’s perspective. During her “report” Parsons talked about a lot of things that happened in this week’s news cycle, such as Ken Bone’s rise to viral fame and subsequent crash back to Earth due to some unearthed comments about Jennifer Lawrence’s leaked photos and the Trayvon Martin shooting. She also touched on the Donald Trump sexual assault allegations and was excited about the new Mary Poppins movie.
But the piece that probably made NBC executives just a tad nervous was when Bayer’s character got around to the reason we’re all talking about Donald Trump’s sexual assault and harassment history, Billy Bush. Parsons, defending herself when Michael Che said she couldn’t continue saying the inappropriate things she was spouting, said
“Billy Bush said bad things, and my mom says he might get $10 million. From this network!”
If they weren’t watching the show before, the people responsible for negotiating that potential settlement definitely started getting phone calls after it aired. No settlement has been confirmed, and it’s more than likely that NBC doesn’t want to keep being reminded of how big of a mistake Bush made and how much it’s going to cost them to shuffle him off his current TODAY Show hosting gig and into unemployment.
It’s a nice reminder though that not everybody at NBC is trying sweep the drama surrounding Bush’s comments completely under the rug.
