Hulu disappears Saturday Night Live episode with Brittany Murphy spoof

I had a look at the post I put up a few hours ago about the bad timing of Saturday Night Live doing a Weekend Update skit with Abby Elliott impersonating Brittany Murphy.

To quote South Park, “And…it’s gone….”

Might want to get the photo of Elliott as Murphy out of there guys.

But even more interesting is that if you go to the SNL page right now, the full episode that was hosted by Blake Lively on December 5th (with musical performance by Rihanna) is gone from the queue. It skips from 12/12/09 with Taylor Lautner to 11/21/09 with Joseph Gordon Levitt.

A little awkward, wouldn’t you say? Just disappearing an entire episode? No sign yet of whether or not they’ll post the whole episode with the Murphy bit edited out. The Hulu policy for SNL is that, “Episodes will be posted Sunday afternoons and are available for 17 days.” Technically I’d think that would mean the entire episode would be coming down on December 23rd, but there are some episodes (#6 and #7) that are up there longer than the 17 day timeframe.

So, I guess SNL got the message from angry Brittany Murphy fans pretty quickly that keeping up the video was out of bounds. This offers an interesting case of the PR problems in the digital age. In the past, it used to be that if something was below board, you could edit it out of the re-run. In the ‘everything goes online’ era, it’s potentially there in perpetuity (if anyone cares) to remind people what a jerk you might have been.