SNL just hired its first female directing team

By William Hughes | October 10, 2018 | 9:07pm

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SNL just hired its first female directing team

Although Saturday Night Live has been doing short films for as long as it’s been on the air, the rise of the internet helped to codify these little bursts of weirdness into a dedicated part of the show’s brand strategy. (Verily, we’re all living in a post-“Lazy Sunday” world.) But while there have been a number of SNL directing teams that have tacked their work onto the show over the last decade or so—from The Lonely Island’s Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone, to Osmany Rodriguez and Matt Villines (a.k.a. Matt & Oz)—they’ve all been, to put none too fine a point on it, dudes. That changed with the show’s most recent season premiere, with the addition of former Funny Or Die directing team Hannah Levy and Adriana Robles to SNL’s roster of talent. (In the interest of full disclosure, we should note that Levy and Robles both used to work for our sister sites Clickhole and The Onion.)

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The duo—who apparently got a last-minute call to join the show right before the 44th season premiere—made their debut with “A New Kyle,” above, which took playful shots at cast member Pete Davidson and his increasingly high profile, and also gave us a fresh chance to watch Kyle Mooney cheerfully cough up blood. Vulture, meanwhile, has done a brief breakdown of some of the pair’s best Funny Or Die work, from riffs on The Handmaid’s Tale, to chirpily nihilistic takes on foreign language instruction. Looking through them, it’s abundantly clear that Robles and Levy have arrived at the show already not-ready-for-primetime; outside the absence of Aidy Bryant or Kenan, it’s easy to imagine any of these clips running on SNL at any point over the last few years, picking up that “Oh shit, did you see that? Here’s a link” buzz in the process.