When Alternative History Becomes a Reality
*To look up unfamiliar terms, check out our Hollywood Glossary.
By Natia Compton, Script Reader at Confidential Nonprofit
Trigger Warning: Sexual Assault
After another night of seeking dopamine highs by watching pop culture videos on YouTube, I stumbled across a Nicki Swift takedown titled “SNL Performances That Completely Destroyed Careers.” Expecting the usual clickbait, I clicked play—ready to debate its claims—and was surprised to see the famous YouTube sensation turned pop star Karmin listed. Once celebrated, the duo, now rebranded under the lead singer’s alter ego Qveen Herby, was supposedly undone by an ill-fated SNL performance.
The video only showed photos of the event, focusing on the lead singer’s dance moves. So, I searched for the original footage on NBC. After scrubbing through S37 Ep14 of SNL hosted by Zooey Deschanel, I was perplexed. Karmin only appeared in the closing credits. The disastrous performance that "destroyed their career" seemed like it had never happened. Determined, I scoured the internet—only to find that the footage had seemingly been scrubbed from existence. Aside from some still images and secondhand reviews, Karmin’s 2012 SNL performance had been erased from history. It didn’t exist.
This was my first brush with the phenomenon of media revisionism in real time.
Science fiction fans will tell you that alternative history is a literary subgenre of speculative fiction that explores what history might have been like if key historical events had unfolded differently than they did in real life. For example, take Stephen King’s book turned miniseries 11.22.63, which chronicles the efforts of a time traveler to stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Or that episode of FAMILY GUY where Brian warns his past self about 9/11 and takes credit for writing the Harry Potter series, which leads to a modern-day apocalypse before Stewie reverts everything back to normal.
To be clear: speculative fiction alters the past to imagine what could have been, whereas media erasure and revisionism involves eliminating or modifying parts of the historical record.
In a time when entertainment culture is reckoning with its problematic past, some of it rather harmless and some more devastating, there’s a growing tendency to alter or even erase those uncomfortable histories. In an effort to protect the future, industry professionals and corporations are increasingly opting to erase or revise their past. But this practice can cause more harm than good. It doesn’t erase the wrongdoing; it erases evidence of it.
Deleting or scrubbing content doesn’t equate to endorsing everything those performances or artifacts once stood for. But pretending they never existed certainly does.
Reality show fans are sure to have heard the name Mama June, whether they liked to or not. After rising to fame from her youngest daughter Alana Thompson’s episode on TODDLERS IN TIARAS to the TLC phenomenon HERE COMES HONEY BOO BOO, which ran from 2012 to 2014, Mama June Shannon got her own spinoff on WeTV titled MAMA JUNE: FROM NOT TO HOT in 2017, which has been running ever since.
But after reports surfaced that June had rekindled a relationship with a convicted sex offender, TLC removed every episode of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo from public archives. The fallout over Mama June’s poor decisions is clear, but was scrubbing the original show entirely from existence the right call? Instead of holding Mama June accountable, TLC’s act of erasure inadvertently works in her favor. Without access to the content that captured her rise to fame, it becomes easier for June—and others like her—to start fresh on a new platform, free from the weight of her past.
Even harmless acts of alternative history raise extreme flags. Consider Usher’s 2024 Super Bowl Halftime Show, where Alicia Keys’ voice cracked during a live performance. Fans watching the show on cable television heard the imperfection; on YouTube, they heard it autotuned.
What happens if the live coverage of Keys’s original performance is erased, like Karmin’s SNL performance, and all we can find are the edited and studio versions? Some would argue it makes for better performances, but I say it takes us to the start of a dangerous new world of falsified history. It starts to feel like BLACK MIRROR episode.
It’s easy to imagine a future where technology like AI enables us to re-edit entire films or performances to eliminate problematic people or moments. In BOJACK HORSEMAN’s episode "Angela," BoJack is offered a contract to authorize a re-edit of Horsin' Around in which his character is erased from the show entirely. This doesn’t seem too far-fetched when you consider that, today, with deepfakes and AI, we have the capacity to alter media without a trace.
Surely, Kevin Hart would love for his homophobic comments in his 2010 stand-up special “Seriously Funny” to be erased from the internet. Sia, too, with her 2021 film MUSIC. But are we really helping the queer and disabled communities by erasing evidence of the celebrities who once wronged them? It takes away the problem—and it takes evidence of the problem with it.
If history can be rewritten to make uncomfortable moments disappear, we lose the opportunity to learn from those mistakes. Instead of holding media accountable, we risk glossing over the past’s complexities in favor of a sanitized, curated narrative.
So, what can we do in the age of accountability, censorship, and evolving media? How do we maintain a record of history without entirely erasing what’s uncomfortable?
One solution is to preserve all content with the context it needs. Much like how movies today come with ratings and disclaimers to ensure age-appropriate viewing, content can also feature disclaimers that acknowledge its harmful elements. This would allow creators to acknowledge past wrongs without erasing the evidence.
Disney has already adopted this approach. In Dumbo and other early animated films, the company has added disclaimers highlighting harmful racial stereotypes: “Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it, and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together.”
Another option is to demonetize problematic content. If maintaining historical accuracy means preserving the work of those who committed wrongdoings, we can strip it of any financial benefit. In doing so, we report history, without incentivizing it.
If you walked into a library and saw someone tearing out pages from a history book, you’d stop them. So why do we let media giants get away with the same thing? Media, like literature, is a time capsule of human progress. It’s unfair—and even dangerous—to leave future audiences with nothing but a curated highlight reel.
In the end, this brings us back to a classic philosophical question: if a musician has a bad performance but no one can see it, did it ever happen? Did the tree really fall in the woods?
Don’t Google it.
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