It was a late Thursday morning in 30 Rock and “Saturday Night Live” head writers Kent Sublette, Streeter Seidell and Alison Gates were running on caffeine and willpower. As per “SNL” tradition, they stayed up all night Tuesday writing potential sketches for the week’s show. Then, on Wednesday night, they picked the sketches that would move forward for the penultimate episode of the season with host Walton Goggins.
This was on top of a star-studded 50th-season special in February with icons like Eddie Murphy, Steve Martin, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler and Will Ferrell gracing the 8H stage once again. Oh, yeah, it was an election year, too.
“It was just kind of a swirl,” Seidell said of the season, which also saw cameos from the likes of Adam Sandler and Dana Carvey each week as the show celebrated its cultural legacy. He added, “Your brain just has to file it away as regular work, like, ‘It’s normal that Mike Myers is here.’” Then Sublette jumped in: “It’s normal that you’re going through security with Kamala Harris and security guards with AR-15s.”
Executive producer and “SNL” creator Lorne Michaels cast the show’s big political roles over the summer, before the 50th season began: Maya Rudolph as Harris, Andy Samberg as Doug Emhoff, Jim Gaffigan as Tim Walz and Dana Carvey as Joe Biden. (That was in addition to James Austin Johnson reprising his spot-on impression of Donald Trump and cast member Bowen Yang being tapped to play JD Vance.) Gates said working with the group of returning vets was a thrill, not just on the cold opens but in other sketches as well, in keeping with the cameo-filled season. “They’re so good and have such funny ideas,” she said.
“There’s obviously a big family element to ‘SNL,’” said Sublette, who’s been with the show since 2007. “When those people come back, you feel that and you feel them feeling that, and it’s a special thing.” He added that everyone felt pressure to get the election right, but everyone having “that same pressure on them elevated it to a point where this seems impossible, but we’re going to figure it out.”
Mission accomplished. The pre-election episodes had their share of moments that broke through to the larger zeitgeist, not the least of which was Kamala Harris’ cameo mere days before the election, when she appeared in a sketch playing her own reflection in a mirror opposite Rudolph. The mirror bit was Michaels’ idea, the writers said, and there was some fear that viewers would cry foul since a mirror gag had just been used a few weeks earlier with Jennifer Coolidge. As it turns out, the fretting was unfounded.
“When the lights came up on Kamala, you felt that audience just go insane. You knew they would be appreciative and excited, but it felt very huge and special when they saw her sitting out there,” Sublette said. To make it even more nerve-racking, Harris couldn’t attend the dress rehearsal, so the vice president was performing the sketch on stage for the first time on live TV.
In the wake of the election, “SNL” viewership remained consistently robust and viewer reaction to the show stayed largely positive week after week. No small feat for a program that is usually declared “dead” at least once every two to three years.
“Week to week, it’s the job that we’ve all been doing for years,” Seidell said. “But it does feel like the reception of the show has been pretty good this season. We’re seeing new cast members popping, and that’s always exciting to see the public discover somebody and really like them, and then that can kind of direct the writing a little bit.”
That was certainly the case for Marcello Hernandez, who joined the show in 2022 but hit rarefied air in Season 50 with the recurring character of Domingo, the paramour of a philandering bride-to-be. After the character debuted in October, there were two more Domingo sketches during the season, including one on the 50th-anniversary special, with Pedro Pascal and Bad Bunny in supporting roles.
Seidell, Sublette and Gates were all thrilled to see Hernandez’s character break out, but admitted they were surprised that the sketch took off the way it did. “You just can’t tell what people are going to absolutely love,” Seidell said. “I always forget, no one wrote a recurring sketch thinking it would be recurring,” Gates added, but Sublette was quick to note, “Domingo deserves.”
The head writers were also eager to point out that they feel the writing staff has only gotten stronger over the past few years, with a diverse group of young comedy voices—stand-ups, performers, writers—added to the mix, all working to keep “SNL” current. “If I like every single thing in the show, that’s a problem, because that means it’s just geared toward me,” Seidell said of how he views his role as a head writer, a job previously held by Seth Meyers and Tina Fey, among others. “It’s not that I hate stuff, but I’m like, ‘That’s not really my style of humor, but everyone laughed at it so I have to acknowledge that this deserves a spot in the show.’”
Sublette added that Michaels advocates for certain sketches based on how often a cast member may have appeared in the season. “I think Lorne is good at taking a chance on things,” he said, noting that even if there’s just one thing about a sketch that feels special, he’ll frequently give it a shot. “Oftentimes it was right and turned out great, and we try to look at that big picture of our cast and who’s being represented as well.”
Domingo was one of many this season that exploded on social media, where Gen Z seems to be getting the bulk of its “SNL” intake. In many ways, “Saturday Night Live” is tailor-made for the TikTok era, with three-to-six-minute sketches that clip easily for online viewing. “I think Lorne knew that in 1975 and he said, ‘In 50 years, this format is going to clip wonderfully,’” Seidell quipped.
“It’s always been a show to discover as a young person; it’s just being done in a new way,” Sublette said. “I would tape it on VHS and look at it with my friends the next day.”
But “SNL’s” reputation has been boosted by the proliferation of online viral sketches separate from the show, Seidell said. “It’s certainly nice with YouTube and things, you can normally find a bright spot every show, whereas maybe before you just had to take it as a whole.”
Something else is different in the era of social media: Many of the show’s stars have their own followings on Instagram and TikTok, with cast members like Bowen Yang, Sarah Sherman, Chloe Fineman, Ego Nwodim and Hernandez often posting clips or behind- the-scenes looks on their personal pages. And new cast member Jane Wickline joined the show with more than 1 million TikTok followers.
So is “SNL” competing with the creator economy? “Sometimes the thinking almost feels like the opposite, where it’s like, ‘What can we do here—because of the production—that you couldn’t do on your own?’” Gates said. “So something scaled down might work on TikTok, but with the amazing sets and things we can pull off here, what can you only do here?”
The strength of this era was clear in the 50th-anniversary special, which made heavy use of the current cast in addition to legacy performers. “When you walked into that room and saw who’s sitting in the crowd, I felt such gratitude,” Seidell said. “I got to be like a little part of this thing that was powerful enough to bring all these people together.” As one of the warm-up performers for the audience, Heidi Gardner recalled the absurdity of being tasked with hyping up a crowd that included Jack Nicholson before the show went live. “I just couldn’t believe what was happening,” she said.
The head writers worked with other “SNL” vets like Fey, Meyers and John Mulaney, who came back to the table to build the live anniversary show. Both Sublette and Seidell were at “SNL” for the 40th-anniversary special and anticipated that the 50th would be “overwhelming.” But when it came time to put pen to paper, they said all the preparation set them up for success.
“Once we got into the writing of it, the actual amount of work that each of us had to do was not greater than a regular show,” Seidell explained. “Everyone had one or two things they were responsible for and then you had longer to work on it. So to me it was like, ‘Oh, this is almost, dare I say, easier than the week-to-week regular show.’”
The constant, of course, is Michaels, who still runs “SNL” every week. Despite retirement rumors bubbling, the 80-year-old has made no indication that he intends to leave the show that he’s steered for nearly half a century. And a couple of hours after the interview with Sublette, Seidell and Gates, the 17th floor of 30 Rock was filled with the smell of popcorn, Michaels’ favorite snack. “Does that mean Lorne’s here?” this reporter asked a young NBC page.
“It does, actually!” the page replied, smiling widely. Back to work.
This story first ran in the Comedy issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
