'Saturday Night Live' Looks Ahead After Big Cast Departures
by EG
Some of the most well-known names on the cast of Saturday Night Live won't be returning next season, and the show's durability will be tested as it moves forward. Kate McKinnon, Aidy Bryant, and Pete Davidson all said farewell to SNL this week, leaving the show to carry on without the cast members who have consistently attracted the most attention over the past few years. Read on for details.
Like the number of justices in the Supreme Court, the exact size of the Saturday Night Live ensemble is not written in the Constitution.
The earliest seasons had only six or seven cast regulars, and the concept of “featured players” only started a few seasons in.
The number of regulars has steadily increased for a variety of reasons, including in-season cast changes, the emergence of Weekend Update hosting as a gig for non-sketch performers and the steady drumbeat for cast inclusivity. More than anything, though, the reason for a bigger cast has been tied to the changes in the TV landscape and to executive producer Lorne Michaels’ increased flexibility with letting his stars take weeks off to shoot outside jobs and then return.
In this, the show’s 47th season, a pinnacle was reached with a whopping 16 cast regulars and five featured players. At any given time, four or five of them could be away shooting an Apple TV+ limited series, a DC movie or who-knows-what. Even then, though, whole weeks would go by where a familiar and often beloved performer would appear in the background of one sketch and never be spotted again.
Saturday Night Live was designed, or at least evolved, to be like a snake, constantly shedding layers of skin, or like a child’s mouth, with teeth falling out as new ones crack the surface of the gums. That has ceased to be the case in recent years because the standard exodus hasn’t been required for stars to stretch their creative limbs. It’s become possible to have Saturday Night Live as a home base and still do a sitcom or a movie.
That’s a long way of saying that even if you don’t think the season 47 cast was the best in the show’s history — it’s a really good cast, better than the writing always showcased — it’s unquestionably the deepest, and if ever there were a time for a major cast exodus to occur without the losses being catastrophic, it’s now.
Directly or indirectly, Kate McKinnon and Aidy Bryant, castmembers since 2012, and Pete Davidson, castmember since 2014, announced their departures in the season finale. There have been reports that Kyle Mooney, castmember since 2013, is leaving as well, though I’m not sure “Gray Adult Pigtails” was necessarily a sketch designed to announce that fact. Part of why this year’s cast is so big is that departures for the past handful of years have been so rare — Beck Bennett last year, Leslie Jones a year or two before that, but mostly just the occasional underused featured player. This is four core players exiting, and it’s completely possible that there could be more.
My saying that mass evacuations are an accepted part of the Saturday Night Live ecosystem doesn’t mean that these aren’t serious losses for the show.
McKinnon, in particular, is entirely irreplaceable. She’s been everything you could want out of an SNL castmember, delivering indelible impressions (Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Rudy Giuliani are only the tip of the iceberg), recurring Weekend Update characters (I hope Olya Povlatsky is OK in today’s Russia) and several regular characters, though perhaps not quite as many as you might think. I’m not sure why she came back for that last “Gray Adult Pigtails” sketch, because McKinnon had the perfect sendoff in the cold open as Colleen Rafferty, a perpetual UFO abductee whose coarse experiences never failed to crack up guest hosts.
Get the rest of the story at The Hollywood Reporter.