For the 2024-2025 TV season, a celebratory mood emanated from Saturday Night Live — even for a show that’s already prone to celebrating its own breakthroughs, milestones, influence and survival on the regular. Last season was the show’s landmark 50th (the actual 50-years-on-the-air milestone is still to come, on Oct. 11), and though most of the actual episodes more or less proceeded as usual, there were still some ringers floating around the studio before and after the actual three-hour special that aired in February. Dana Carvey, Mike Myers, Maya Rudolph and Andy Samberg did recurring political impressions throughout the season, supplementing an already-large 17-member cast with little hits of remixed nostalgia alongside an eclectic ensemble of sketch performers and stand-up comics.
Now the party seems to be over. Though a trio of cast members announced departures prior to Season 50, the past week has seen a larger exodus, with four cast members already confirmed to leave and the possibility of more following them out the door; the season doesn’t actually start up until Oct. 4. Among those exiting, Heidi Gardner probably made that decision herself; she did a robust and highlight-filled eight seasons on the show, and had mentioned a feeling of “sketch fatigue” in a podcast interview last spring. Emil Wakim (gone after one season), Devon Walker (three seasons), and Michael Longfellow (also three) sounded less voluntary. Wakim and Longfellow specifically alluded to getting a disappointing call informing them of the decision. Video-making and writing trio Please Don’t Destroy is also breaking up, though not all are leaving; Ben Marshall will presumably appear more often as one of the five newly announced cast members, Martin Herlihy remains on as a writer, and John Higgins is leaving altogether. Two experienced and SNL nerd-fave writers, Rosebud Baker and Celeste Yim, are also leaving, though, like Gardner, their departures sound more like their own call.
The rash of departures and new hires has intensified speculation about whether anyone else is leaving. Right now, just two cast members are soft-confirmed to return: James Austin Johnson and Chloe Fineman. SNL impresario Lorne Michaels mentioned in an interview that Johnson would continue to be cursed with his accurate but increasingly toothless Trump impression (not exactly his words, granted, and Trump exhaustion aside, Johnson is a clutch “glue” player like Phil Hartman and Beck Bennett before him). And the SNL detectives at the New York Post have intuited, based on an Instagram comment about Longfellow’s departure, that Fineman will be back for her seventh season. (She lamented to Longfellow about missing him at future pre-tape sessions, seeming to presume she’d still be there.)
That leaves plenty of cast members who haven’t said anything one way or the other. It seems safe to assume that Bowen Yang (six seasons), Ego Nwodim (seven seasons) and Andrew Dismukes (five seasons) form a core of veterans who are likely eyeing the kind of eight-to-10-season run that’s become increasingly common for the show’s success stories. Sarah Sherman isn’t quite at that level yet, but with four seasons under her belt, a clear following and plenty of screen time last season, she seems likely to come back for another season or three. There are also a couple of super-veterans who seem like they’d warrant one of the show’s occasional fond farewells: Mikey Day, who has been with the show for well over a decade (starting as a writer in 2013 and moving up to the cast three years later), and the record-setting Kenan Thompson, who has an astonishing 22 seasons under his belt. So those six will probably still be around. Among newer faces, Marcello Hernández seems like a lock to return — the crowd seems to love him — and Jane Wickline and Ashley Padilla (both new last season) are possible, too, given that their fellow freshman Emil Wakim was already let go. Along with Marshall and brand-new hires Veronika Slowikowska, Tommy Brennan, Jeremy Culhane and Kam Patterson, that would make 14 regulars, a more manageable crew than past seasons with nearly 20 onscreen participants.
That doesn’t, however, account for who might be anchoring Weekend Update. Colin Jost and Michael Che are the two longest-tenured holders of that job in the show’s history (and Jost was a writer for years before, giving him two decades of SNL experience) and as such, they seemed likely to receive some kind of send-off. When that didn’t happen last spring, it seemed possible they’d return. On the other hand, Che has been making online and/or off-the-cuff noises about leaving the show for years. And in Jost’s memoir, published a full half-decade or so ago at this point, he throws around the idea of leaving after the 2020 presidential election. They both seem well overdue to move on, and there were rumors of Longfellow testing for a possible Weekend Update spot last spring. Fans thought that seemed like a great fit. Instead, he’s been bounced from the show entirely, leaving the show’s increasingly lengthy fake-news centerpiece in flux.
It Might Be Time for Lorne Michaels to Retire
Having Shane Gillis host “Saturday Night Live” is just the latest in a string of bad decisionsChangeover is nothing new for the show, but despite the SNL ability to break new comedy stars and their 21st century ability to hold onto them, the Lorne Michaels track record seems to be diminished. With five new additions for Season 51, this makes 13 total new on-camera hires over the past four seasons. More than a third of them are already gone, and if recent history is any indication, that’ll be closer to half by the end of Season 51. The recent churn of featured players or even regular cast members who don’t make it past two or three seasons (including several talented one-and–done folks like Chloe Troast) has been as heavy as it was about a decade ago, when the show couldn’t find a place for John Milhiser, Brooks Wheelan, Jon Rudnitsky, Luke Null or Noël Wells.
Maybe it’s just tough (as ever) comparing the show to its past, in this case the early 2010s that now seem like all-star seasons: Kristen Wiig! Bill Hader! Jason Sudeikis! Fred Armisen! Kate McKinnon! Even short-lived players like Tim Robinson went on to great careers. It would also be easy enough to pin the more recent slippage to Michaels’ seemingly renewed interest in hiring stand-up comedians, who have potential for personality-driven breakouts like Pete Davidson or Leslie Jones (or reaching further back, Adam Sandler or David Spade), but don’t always find a consistent groove on a sketch-based show. It’s no surprise that stand-ups Walker, Wakim and Longfellow seemed most at home behind the Update desk for commentary pieces as themselves, rather than inhabiting sketch characters.
The show has also generally fared better with cast members who work well as teams (like Kyle Mooney and Beck Bennett, Aidy Bryant and Kate McKinnon, or recently Andrew Dismukes and James Austin Johnson) rather than soloists. Michaels has said that the influx of stand-ups has more to do with who was auditioning than a conscious choice, but it sure seems like a preference when one of the new hires is Kam Patterson… a personality-driven stand-up without a sketch-comedy background, alongside Tommy Brennan, another stand-up. It also deepens the irony of how hard the improv-trained Nwodim killed last season when taking on the persona of Miss Eggy, a stubbornly non-topical stand-up comic. The Miss Eggy segment spoofed stand-up of a certain era; in the context of the show, it was also a bolt of conceptual inspiration (imagining a White House Correspondents’ Dinner emcee doing routines about bad food and dating after 50) that played particularly well on live TV. So was having host Ariana Grande sing off-key in “Domingo,” one of their most popular sketches of recent years. Some of this stuff plays well on YouTube and TikTok; Jane Wickline, a promisingly offbeat hire from last year, comes from that world, as does this year’s newbie Veronika Slowikowska.
But those are platforms that often favor one-comic shows. Countless shorts on YouTube and TikTok feature one branded personality interacting only with other versions of themselves, and not as feats of Eddie Murphy-style virtuosity. (Slowikowska’s videos often feature two roommate characters: a straight man to point out her weird behavior and an unseen cameraman. It’s essentially just her engaging in odd behavior for two minutes.) Stand-up comedy, too, can play great in little digital-video bursts, while even the shorter SNL bits need at least a few minutes to set up, develop and pay off. This is not something podcast bros and personality-driven comics are necessarily trained to do. Of the four completely new-to-SNL cast members this year, only Jeremy Culhane is known for doing sketch and improv.
It’s worth watching, then, whether the show nonetheless re-invests in those fundamentals for Season 51. The show has survived in part through its stubborn traditionalism — which, granted, includes a bunch of traditions Michaels more or less made up to suit his weird predilections. To some degree, that cast-member churn is part of it, whether natural or dysfunctional. The latter definitely springs to mind related to Michaels’ seemingly constant search, whether conscious or not, for new white guys. The show is losing one white dude in Michael Longfellow, and seemingly gaining three more, the majority of the five additions. With Michaels closer to the end of his career than the beginning and the TV landscape completely different than it was in 1975, Season 50 may turn out to be one of the less consequential in SNL history. It didn’t have much time for major shake-ups. Season 51, on the other hand, could turn out to be the show’s most pivotal point in years.
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