“I think the show has always brought people in from different ages and different generations and it’s how it revives itself,” he told Entertainment Tonight. “It’s always hard when people leave but there’s a time for that and our audiences always stayed relatively young and more so now with TikTok. And change is good. And the people we’re bringing in I’m really excited about.”
Though obviously still rooted in the traditional broadcast television variety genre, Lorne Michaels and Saturday Night Live have developed a strong relationship with the web in its modern era. The show more or less invented a certain kind of internet sketch comedy with The Lonely Island and “Lazy Sunday” in 2005. In the time since, SNL has begun hiring comics who already have an online following, like Good Neighbor (Kyle Mooney, Beck Bennett, and writers Nick Rutherford and Dave McCary), Please Don’t Destroy (Ben Marshall, John Higgins, and Martin Herlihy), and Jane Wickline. TikTok is the new frontier of this phenomenon, but all of this season’s new hires—Tommy Brennan, Jeremy Culhane, Kam Patterson, and Veronika Slowikowska—have made a name for themselves on the platform, posting original sketches or stand-up clips.
“What’s thrilling about SNL, and the reason I think it’s had its longevity, is that it has absolutely evolved with the time, with the generation, with the style and tone of each new comic voice that came along,” original Saturday Night Live cast member Laraine Newman recently told The Hollywood Reporter. “And with the recent hires—Veronika, I noticed her. I thought, ‘God, this girl is really good,’ and she came from a sphere that is very new, which is streaming and TikTok.”
Of course, for the show to change and evolve, the cast does, too. Some veterans, like Ego Nwodim, move on of their own accord, while others, like newcomer Emil Wakim, are let go. Newman stressed that comics who leave Saturday Night Live, even after one season, often go on to find success (“Michaela Watkins had one season. There are so many people [like] that”). That makes sense, because they usually have to be talented to get in the door: “Lorne said a wonderful thing about all the people that audition, which is, if they’re there, they’re funny. They’ve gotten to that point, they’re funny. So there’s not one person, I think, that has been on the show that isn’t really, spectacularly talented.”
Being axed, though, wasn’t something Newman had to worry about in the 1970s. “That was the time when Lorne didn’t fire people,” she shared. “For better or for worse, he was very clear that he did not believe in firing people. That stood for a while, and then that changed.”
Everything changes—except, so far, for Lorne Michaels being the boss. Accepting the award for Outstanding Live Variety Special for the 50th anniversary show, Michaels wryly observed: “When I won [an Emmy] for the first time 50 years ago in 1975, I was younger and I had a lot of dreams about what would happen in my life, and not one of those dreams was that I’d still be doing the same show for the next 50 years. However, here we are.”
