Big news is coming soon for Saturday Night Live, executive producer Lorne Michaels revealed Friday.
“It’ll be announced in a week or so,” Michaels told Puck’s Matt Belloni of the “shake-up” he has planned for the 51st season. Michaels was adamant that he wanted to keep the core cast together through the show’s seminal 50th season, so this season he feels “the pressure to reinvent.”
Michaels didn’t want any “disruptions” or “anything that was going to take the focus off” the 50th season, so he decided to keep the cast mostly intact last year. “And we had an election,” he pointed out. This time around, big changes, including the exits of several cast members, new faces—including on “Weekend Update”—are all on the horizon, he said. The determinations will be made within the next couple of weeks.
Michaels made news on several other fronts during the interview, including his thoughts on The Late Show‘s cancelation, the future of Seth Meyers and Jimmy Fallon’s late-night shows in the age of Donald Trump, as well as what it was like behind the scenes of “SNL50,” in his first interview since the special aired.
1. He was “stunned” by Colbert’s firing.
Michaels told Puck that he was as surprised as anyone when it was announced that Colbert’s Late Show was canceled. “I was just stunned,” he said, but he didn’t chalk it all up to Paramount appeasing Trump by booting his nemesis off the air. Michaels said, “I don’t think any of us are going to ever know” if Paramount canceled Colbert to appease Trump.
“There’s two audiences now,” he explained, echoing Puck’s report that the show hadn’t been profitable for years, “TikTok and YouTube,” on the one hand and the “linear audience” on the other. While he’s still still doing SNL “as if everybody’s watching that night,” he said Fallon “does a lot of stuff that you can watch all day.”
Comparing Colbert’s situation to CBS’ cancelation of the Smother Brothers, Michaels concluded, “Being a martyr is thrilling, and everyone’s cheering, and then it’s show business. It just goes on.”
2. He thinks Fallon and Meyers are “safe” from cancelation.
Michaels said that the two late-night talk shows he produces for SNL alums Fallon and Meyers are “safe” for the “foreseeable future.” Each of the hosts have contracts in place that don’t expire until 2028, and Michaels explained that he believes Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, who he has “very high admiration for,” will keep true to the agreements because he “has integrity.
“Even with this president,” Michaels insisted. “Whatever crimes Trump is committing, he’s doing it in broad daylight. There is absolutely nothing that the people who vote for him—or me—don’t know. You know what I mean? And he is a really powerful media figure. He knows how to hold an audience. That’s a very powerful thing, and I think it was always underestimated. His politics are obviously not my politics, but denouncing [Trump] doesn’t work.”
3. James Austin Johnson will remain in the cast as Donald Trump.
Michaels confirmed that the show’s resident Trump impersonator James Austin Johnson will keep at it on the next season—seemingly making him the only cast member who is 100% safe.
Even though some show staff, including cast member Bowen Yang, expressed some apprehension about the show’s political tone in the upcoming season because Trump only has to “say one thing” to cause a firestorm of retaliation from his supporters, Michaels said he has no concerns about how the show handles political comedy. He told Puck that he doesn’t believe that parodying Trump and MAGA will be any more difficult than it’s been in the past few years. “I don’t think anybody knows what Michael Che’s politics are, but they do think he’s funny,” he said.
4. Taylor Swift was invited to appear on SNL50—but her tour schedule got in the way.
Michaels said that he talked with Swift and boyfriend Travis Kelce about potentially doing something for the special. “She and Travis came to Pete Davidson’s show, the first show of the season before, and I talked to her about it then,” he revealed. “But I knew that her [Eras] tour was mammoth. And I thought, If she can come, she’ll come, and if she can’t, she can’t.”
5. Sabrina Carpenter insisted on changing Paul Simon lyric for their SNL50 duet.
One megastar who did make the show, of course, was Sabrina Carpenter, who Michaels said taught him a thing or two about Gen Z. Carpenter opened the show by singing at duet with Paul Simon of his classic song “Homeward Bound,” which Michaels pointed out contains the lyrics “cigarettes and magazines.” Simon agreed to change that lyrics—“airport lounges and magazines,” she sang—because Carpenter didn’t want to sing the word “cigarettes.”
“It was a slight change—I don’t think anyone would have noticed it—but it was an accommodation between generations. Not that he was attached to the lyric, particularly,” Michaels said of Simon. “And I thought, ‘Oh, that’s the difference in this generation.’”
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