What Is With All of the ‘SNL’ Cast Exits?

With four cast members (and counting) not returning for Saturday Night Live Season 51, the post-anniversary season of SNL looks like a bit of a bloodbath, and that’s because it kinda is. And that may be by design.

Before the first bit of the drip drip drip of cast exits started to come through, creator Lorne Michaels warned that this could be the case. He talked to Puck last week and explained his rationale for making big swings in the cast changes this year.

Season 50’s cast had some exits as well — Punkie Johnson, Molly Kearney, and Chloe Troast — but Michaels said that because he was planning an anniversary event for the landmark year, “there couldn’t be those kind of disruptions or anything that was going to take the focus off.” So most of the major players came back. However, for Season 51, he admitted to feeling pressure to reinvent the show.

So far, that has included the departures of Devon Walker, Emil Wakim, Michael Longfellow, and the most veteran woman castmate Heidi Gardner, plus writers Celeste Yim and Rosebud Baker. The sheer volume of exits has given many people pause about what’s really happening. On Longfellow’s Instagram post about his exit, for example, Johnson (who had some experience in this department) wrote, “wtf is happening… This is like the departed.”

However, the writing has been on the wall for a while as far as some long-timers of the show have been concerned. Back in May, record-setter Kenan Thompson told Page Six that he expected the show’s cast to be upended ahead of Season 51. “It feels like there’s maybe, possibly, a lot of change next year,” he said.

Plus, Gardner herself indicated that she might be ready to follow the exit sign out, saying on a podcast, “I will say the only thing that I’ve started to feel a little bit is just sketch fatigue, or idea fatigue. At this point, after doing Groundlings and SNL for so long, I’m, like, ‘I’ve written a lot of sketches.’”

There have been other SNL stars who’ve indicated that they might be done ahead of Season 51 as well, but their fates remain unclear as of this writing.

In other words, even though it seems like a lot of SNL stars have been wiped from the cast list for SNL Season 51, it’s not that terribly unexpected.

Fans debated the issue on the show page on Reddit, with one observer noting, “This happens every year. In the month before every new season, there are a flurry of cast member departure announcements followed by cast member hiring announcements. It’s like a sports team in the off season. There may be more departures this year than usual because a lot of people seemed to be staying on to make it to Season 50 which led to criticisms of a ‘too big’ cast in recent years and Lorne Michaels hinting at a ‘big shake up’ this season but, other than that, this is completely normal.”

If there are more big moves still to come, though, that sentiment might change. We’ll see.

Saturday Night Live, Season 51 Premiere, October 4, 11:30/10:30c, NBC