In 1984, Larry David famously quit his job as a writer at Saturday Night Live, immediately regretted his impulsive decision, then returned to work the next week like it never happened. The incident, which would go on to inspire the Seinfeld episode “The Revenge,” evidently established a precedent that Lorne Michaels is now taking advantage of. The show’s mercurial creator and producer, who, in 2020, announced his plans to potentially leave the show after its upcoming 50th season, has now revealed he, too, will unceremoniously return to work for the show’s 51st season in fall 2025 like nothing happened.
Per a new cover story in The Hollywood Reporter with Michaels and “Weekend Update” co-anchors Michael Che and Colin Jost, Michaels put to bed succession talks — and widespread speculation that Seth Meyers or Tina Fey would be filling his vacated spot at SNL — by saying, “As long as it’s important and I can be useful, I’ll stay.” He added that he may shoulder less work going forward, but that the show could nonetheless count on his presence for the immediate future: “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 whom I rely on for other things, but, in the end, you really need someone to say, ‘This is what we’re doing.’ 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.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Michaels hinted at the show’s plans for SNL’s much-anticipated upcoming 50th season without divulging too much. He gave a characteristically noncommittal response about whether cast member James Austin Johnson would continue to portray Donald Trump on the show, saying that SNL has to “reinvent” the role post-debate; confirmed that Steve Martin declined his offer to play Tim Walz on the show (but that he may appear this season in another capacity); and that he’d use cameos in election sketches as a chance for other people “who’ve been part of the show” to mark the season-50 milestone.
Michaels also took the opportunity to relitigate the controversy about his hiring and subsequent firing of Shane Gillis in 2019, saying that, when the comedian returned to host last season, it validated Michaels’s initial instincts to cast him and that the backlash was overblown: “The overreaction to it was so stunning — and the velocity of it was 200 Asian companies were going to boycott the show. It became a scandal and I go, ‘No, no, he’s just starting and he’s really funny and you don’t know how we’re going to use him.’ And when he came back to the show last year [to host], we saw, ‘Oh, right, he’s really talented, and he would’ve been really good for us.’”
Of the shake-ups to the cast that have been announced in recent weeks — the departures of Punkie Johnson, Molly Kearney, and Chloe Troast, and the hiring of Emil Wakim, Ashley Padilla, and Jane Wickline — Michaels said the show “just had to make changes, so we did.” For now, fans will go back to speculating if Michaels will ever decide that the “changes” SNL has to make will ever involve him.
