With the noted exception of Kenan Thompson—who, we can only assume, will one day be permanently interred somewhere on the set of Studio 8H—every Saturday Night Live cast member gets fired eventually. The best you can hope for in that notably high-pressure gig is to come to some kind of mutual arrangement with Lorne Michaels and the powers-that-be after a nice, long, successful run, navigating a graceful exit. But almost nobody gets fired from the series twice—except Chris Parnell.
Parnell (who’s doing promotion right now for the latest season of Rick And Morty) got into the details of his firing, and then re-hiring, on the long-running sketch show in a recent episode of The Patrick LabyorSheaux With Patrick Labyorteaux, recounting the very odd experience of actually getting an apology from Michaels when he brought him back to the series after a 12-episode absence in 2001.
This all went down back at the turn of the century, starting when Parnell found out at the end of the show’s 26th season that he wasn’t being asked back. (Molly Shannon and Jerry Minor also departed at that time; Shannon was a mutual thing, while Minor, like Parnell, was let go.) Parnell, who’d thought he’d hit his stride three seasons in, was genuinely shocked by the firing, as were some of his colleagues, including Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan. (Both reportedly lobbied Michaels to bring him back.) Efforts supposedly extended to the point that one of the show’s writers, T. Sean Shannon, apparently brought a sketch to the weekly table read that was a thinly veiled reference to Parnell’s firing, featuring a talented and well-liked Benihana chef whose termination provoked mass outrage from his co-workers. “They read it at the table, from what I heard, to crickets,” Parnell notes. “It was like fucking pointing the finger hard at everybody involved with me getting fired.” Parnell says that, to this day, he has no idea why he was either fired or brought back, suggesting at one point that there might have been one particular NBC exec who didn’t care for him. (We do have to take some of his memories with a grain of salt, though: He states in the interview that his 12-episode hiatus, from 2001 to 2002, meant he dodged Donald Trump’s first episode as host, which is patently untrue; Trump hosted the series in 2004, in an episode Parnell appeared in.)
Still, it’s a wide-ranging and frank interview, including Parnell’s reflections on some of the drama that overtook Rick And Morty in recent years. He doesn’t go into any of his feelings about series co-creator (and star) Justin Roiland, or his firing from all his roles on the show—but he did discuss an apparently massive Zoom call that happened between the show’s cast and crew after news broke, in which lots of people aired their worries and uncertainties over the series’ fate.
