If you know anything about Saturday Night Live at all beyond what you see live from New York, it’s probably that it’s a notoriously crazy place to work. Putting together an entire 90 minutes of television in less than a week is an enormous challenge, and the show’s infamous Tuesday-night writing sessions — in which writers and cast members stay up until 4 a.m. or so writing sketches to present at read-through the following afternoon — are the stuff of legend. The grueling schedule and the disappointment of not getting your sketches on air are baked into the experience of working at SNL, but lately, there’s been a rash of former cast members and writers speaking out about what a “toxic” environment it really is.
The most recent instance of this happened last week when Heidi Gardner, who departed the show after eight seasons this year (reportedly not willingly), appeared on her former castmate Ego Nwodim’s podcast Thanks Dad and called SNL a “challenging place” to work. “It’s not the easiest place to work, but you were such a huge gift, and I absolutely adore and love you,” Nwodim responded. The pair discussed the show’s competitive atmosphere, with Nwodim pointing out that “we have egos” and “want things for ourselves” and “we want to succeed, and there weren’t a lot of times when we were able to succeed in the way we wanted at the exact same time.”
Nwodim, who also left the show ahead of Season 51, added that she’d hoped the cast could be “winning together” so they could have a “full celebration and not one of us mourning or frustrated.” The comments from her and Gardner come just a few months after Devon Walker’s candid social media post announcing his own departure.
“Me and the show did three years together, and sometimes it was really cool. Sometimes it was toxic as hell,” he wrote on Instagram. “But … we made the most of what it was, even amidst all of the dysfunction. We made a fucked up lil family.”
“There is a measure of humanity that the show could benefit from,” Walker explained to Variety back in September. “What ends up happening over the summer is oftentimes people are left hanging with big life decisions — people trying to start families or buy homes — and there’s no word from the show about whether they have their job. The show won’t tell them all summer and then will ultimately end up firing them when there’s been months of them trying to work their situation out.”
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Could Season 51 be the most pivotal point in years?“That wasn’t my situation, but I’ve known of situations where that’s happened,” he clarified. “If there’s one thing I hope for the future of the show, it’s that a sprinkle of humanity could be added into it. I understand it’s show business and it’s cutthroat, but people have lives, and people deserve to know the status of their job at a reasonable juncture. Most people are told they’re coming back to work in a week.”
And those are just the comments people are willing to make publicly. An anonymous source simply identified as “an insider” at the show recently told Rob Shuter’s #ShuterScoop that “SNL thrives on humiliation” and described it as a “snake pit of cruelty, sabotage and bullying,” one that makes the Ellen DeGeneres scandal seem “like Sesame Street.”
By all accounts, the work environment at Saturday Night Live has been like this for the entirety of its 50-year run. Most cast members — hell, even most hosts — know what they’re getting into when they agree to be on the show. But it sure seems like more and more of them are willing to talk about it. Is it enough to change the culture at the comedy institution?
At first glance, probably not. Lorne Michaels has run the show (most of the time) his way for a half-century, and he’s not about to switch it up now. (As that anonymous insider also pointed out, “At Ellen, people feared the host. At SNL, the cast attack each other — and Lorne lets it happen.”) Michaels is a comedy kingmaker; most performers are probably unwilling to complain or challenge him out of concern for their careers. But Michaels is also 80 years old, and rumors have been swirling about potential successors for whenever he finally decides to retire. Will tradition (and attitudes about earning one’s stripes that date back all the way to the 70s) prevail, or will whoever eventually takes over for Michaels implement some more HR-friendly changes? That remains to be seen.
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