Well, It Was Make Believe

Let’s give the folks at “Saturday Night Live” the benefit of the doubt and assume it was no accident when they did a series of political ad spoofs featuring Kristen Wiig as a candidate for mayor of “Glen Falls.”

After all, it would be pretty embarrassing for a major network with an army of researchers and fact checkers to make such an elementary mistake.

Again.

Remember when the mercury hit  -30 F about this time last year, and Today host Matt Lauer asked viewers how they’d like to be waking up in Glen Falls? That was live TV, so a slip like that is understandable (and Lauer got it right next time).

But Saturday’s skits, featuring Wiig as mayoral candidate Glenda Okones, were canned snippets that included on-screen graphics that mentioned Glen Falls.

The skits never mentioned New York, so it’s possible that the writers meant to create a fictional town (though the clipped accent that Wiig spoke with — she graduated from high school in Rochester — certainly sounded familiar to local ears).

Then again, the ads featured a candidate unearthing all the dirt on herself, the better to blunt attacks by the opposition. She confesses that she isn’t a good listener, favors her youngest daughter over her oldest, and doesn’t care about the environment.

“If you’re looking for a cute mayor who listens to you, I am not your candidate,” she says. “But if you’re OK with this, Vote Okones!”

So yes, a fictional place would only be appropriate for that trip to Fantasy Land. Or is it Fantay Land?

— Bill Callen