Lorne Michaels maintains that Shane Gillis would have been good for Saturday Night Live

There’s a strong case to be made that Gillis’ work hasn’t materially changed since 2019. Though he apologized “to anyone who’s actually offended by anything I said,” he later called his own apology “corny” and took it back pretty quickly. After the firing, Gillis’ star continued to rise, but he also continued to engage with and dabble in corners of the comedy world that are racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic. 

Nevertheless, Michaels invited him back to host in February 2024, and in his opinion “we saw, ‘Oh right, he’s really talented, and he would’ve been really good for us.'” (The A.V. Club might disagree, having rated his episode a C+.) Michaels’ point about political correctness is that “everything became way too serious. It was like a mania. And the velocity of cancellation—and lots of people deserved to not be liked—it just became not quite the Reign of Terror, but it was like you’re judging everybody on every position they have on every issue as opposed to, ‘Are they any good at the thing they do?'” he said to THR. “I do think that period is winding down and, I believe, the people who do awful things will still be punished.”

It’s true, cancel culture is not quite the Reign of Terror. It can’t even earnestly be compared to McCarthyism, given how relatively few folks in comedy and elsewhere have actually been blacklisted from Hollywood based on “cancellation.” Gillis, for example, did get fired from SNL but now has his own Netflix show. Meanwhile, Asian American advocacy groups are still seeking a genuine apology from Gillis, and as recently as June of this year were calling for Netflix to cut ties with him. 

Michaels’ view of the situation—”Are they any good at the thing they do?”—is both more practical and more ruthless, but at least it’s consistent; he’s the same guy who brought on Donald Trump in 2015 and Andrew Dice Clay in 1990. It sounds like being the ultimate decision maker, in this and other areas of the show, is what’s keeping him going, despite having previously flirted with retiring after the landmark 50th season. “It’s more about keeping it on course than anything else, and, obviously, I really love it. And every year there are more and more people that I rely on for other things, but, in the end, you really need someone to say, ‘This is what we’re doing,'” he explained to THR. “So, I don’t really have an answer; I just know that this is kind of what I do and as long as I can keep doing it, I’ll keep doing it. There’s no immediate plan.”