As Saturday Night Live celebrated its 50th anniversary earlier this year, the discussion about the show’s legacy rarely focused on its comedy. Instead, the emphasis was placed on its lore and rituals as well as the Sphinx-like decision making of the show’s creator, showrunner, and executive producer, Lorne Michaels. Unlike that of any other TV program, SNL’s mystique—behind the hiring process, how to break out on-air, the clockwork nature of the production schedule—has become ingrained in the public imagination. So when the announcement of several cast departures and additions arrived ahead of Season 51, which premieres this Saturday, viewers tried to read the tea leaves. Their question: Had Michaels decided that now was the time to wipe the slate clean?
Such a move wouldn’t be unprecedented. In 1986, for Season 12, the showrunner retained only three members of the previous season’s group, including the Season 11 standout Jon Lovitz; he nixed all but five performers in fall 1995, following the notoriously stagnant Season 20. (Among those cut: Chris Farley and Adam Sandler.) Michaels’s approach has been gentler in recent times, however. The phaseout of the beloved 2010s lineup happened more slowly, with key members leaving in smaller waves. The ensemble swelled to a historic size for Season 50, presumably so that everyone could hang around for a year of celebrations. A revamp following that landmark year seemed essential.
Yet whispers of a big shake-up have proved to be little more than … whispers. That’s not to suggest that some of the departures weren’t surprising: The eight-season veteran Heidi Gardner may or may not be leaving of her own volition. Ego Nwodim’s late-breaking exit was another significant blow; she had been the most talented rising star of recent years, rivaled only by the Emmy-nominated Bowen Yang. Plenty of the show’s current stalwarts will remain, however, including Yang, Sarah Sherman, and Chloe Fineman. The recent breakout Marcello Hernández, who got a lot of screen time last season, will likely be afforded plenty more room to grow. James Austin Johnson remains the show’s key impressionist; Colin Jost and Michael Che will extend their record-setting run as “Weekend Update” hosts; the institution that is Kenan Thompson isn’t going anywhere.
What could signal a meaningful change are the show’s newcomers—a gaggle of mega-online youngsters (I kid, somewhat). It’s notable how immediately new SNL cast members can now be evaluated by the public, thanks to the internet. For most of the show’s existence, Michaels and his team would gather folks from the country’s most acclaimed improv troupes and sketch-comedy theaters: the Second City in Chicago, the Groundlings in L.A., New York’s Upright Citizens Brigade. The SNL diehards would gather information about the upcoming performers’ live acts: a character that had stood out, perhaps, and whether they might fill the role of, say, a utility player or an impressionist. Most of this year’s five additions, by contrast, have résumés that reflect the collective shift of comedy production in recent years. They’ve found their footing not onstage but on podcasts, TikTok, and streaming platforms.
This direction—padding the ensemble with social-media-friendly faces—represents more of a nudge toward the future than a massive overhaul. Taken together, though, the show’s freshest players look to be a more internet-savvy crowd than the veterans around them. Jane Wickline, who had built up her rep on TikTok during the coronavirus pandemic, is staying on for a second year. Ben Marshall, the most appealing member of SNL’s digital-short-making sketch group Please Don’t Destroy, is moving into a performing role. And of the new names, I best recognized the ones whose work in short-form comedy has spread across the internet.
Like Wickline, Jeremy Culhane has a gift for constructing strange, sub-two-minute videos; his catalog consists mostly of him chipperly ranting at the camera while the scene’s premise disintegrates. Culhane made a name for himself by appearing on Dropout, a subscription-based streaming service that features a lot of cheaply made improv-comedy games. Although likely unknown to older audiences, the platform is hugely popular with younger comedy fans, and has become a bubbling cauldron for emergent voices. Veronika Slowikowska, the sole new female hire this season, has also found an audience by leaning into her particular personality. She’s gained a following on TikTok and elsewhere by spoofing very specific types of people—like an unpredictable roommate or a socially awkward hanger-on—in micro-format.
The other two members of their cohort are best known as stand-up comedians, a role that often makes for a less versatile kind of sketch performer; Michaels tends to sprinkle them into the cast with segments such as “Weekend Update” in mind. One of the newbies, Tommy Brennan, took a fairly traditional route to the show: working in Chicago and performing at Montreal’s Just for Laughs festival (a classic springboard for young comics). Brennan’s journey to Studio 8H, however, marks him as an outlier, especially when pitted against the other stand-up in the mix: Kam Patterson, who is arriving from the Austin scene, a thriving-but-controversial branch of the comedy world loosely organized around Joe Rogan and his imitators.
Patterson’s rise to fame follows the trajectory of perhaps the most fearsomely popular online comics. His appearances on Kill Tony, a podcast hosted by the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, helped raise his profile; the show has achieved both a huge listenership and notoriety for its crude, taboo-busting sensibility. Hinchcliffe generated headlines for an inflammatory joke about Puerto Ricans he made at a Trump rally in 2024; to his nearly 2.5 million YouTube subscribers, he’s akin to a cruel demigod. Patterson’s most popular material, meanwhile, includes lots of tacit admiration for Trump and casual use of slurs in front of guests, such as Tucker Carlson—some of the simplest forms of provocation.
Until now, Michaels has almost entirely avoided recruiting performers of this ilk. Perhaps he was discouraged by the firestorm that erupted after he hired the buzzy stand-up Shane Gillis in 2019. After his past racist and homophobic comments surfaced online, the comic was let go before his tenure even began. Gillis has since become a megastar on the live circuit (and hosted SNL twice), while Michaels has expressed frustration with the network’s insistence that he nix the stand-up. Six years later, Michaels seems ready to take another swipe at the hot stove by bringing on Patterson—whose relationship to right-wing personalities may make him more polarizing among SNL fans than Gillis did.
For all these internet-savvy newcomers, though, making it to SNL is just the first part of the battle. The real challenge is fitting their personal stylings—be it front-facing-camera weirdness, bizarre improv, specific impressions, or baroque insults—into a strict format. Although the show’s sense of humor may have changed over the years, the way Michaels does business mostly hasn’t. Simply plucking young stars from viewers’ social-media feeds won’t radically alter or refresh SNL. But if any of these performers can find a way to stand out, they’ll be earning the kind of recognition that even the most outrageous podcast host can only dream of.
The post The One Big Change SNL Is Making appeared first on The Atlantic.
