
Here’s the thing about Saturday Night Live: it is always dying and always about to be reborn. That’s the premise, the pitch, the myth. Every time someone leaves, the show is declared finished; every time someone arrives, it’s hailed as reborn. By now, SNL has spent 50 years on its deathbed and 50 years being resurrected, which is either resilience or a symptom of untreated narcissism.
As the show lurches into its 51st season this fall, it does so under the shadow of a mass exodus that looks less like “natural turnover” and more like a talent raid after a particularly bad staff meeting. Heidi Gardner, eight-season veteran, Weekend Update icon, and possessor of a commitment to characters so fragile they became enduring memes, is out. Alongside her, the younger ranks—Michael Longfellow, Devon Walker, Emil Wakim—have also exited. The writers’ room, once the only part of 30 Rock where interns could whisper their jokes without being eaten alive, has been reshaped by the departures of Celeste Yim and Rosebud Baker.
This isn’t merely a staff shuffle; it’s the creative equivalent of a levee breach. SNL is standing on the far side of Season 50—an anniversary that was meant to be a coronation, a nostalgic high-wire act of alumni cameos and archival montages—and facing the uncomfortable question: what now?
Lorne Michaels, who turned 80 last year but still speaks as if he’s narrating a documentary about the Canadian wilderness, claims he felt “the pressure to reinvent.” This is a man who has reinvented by doing precisely the same thing for half a century, so the word deserves a raised eyebrow. Reinvention at SNL tends to mean one of two things: add a new cast member who does Trump, or fire someone who does TikTok. The larger structure never changes. The cold open will still be a funeral march of political impressions. The monologue will still be an exercise in whether the host can read cue cards without sweating. Weekend Update will still be where the show remembers it’s allowed to be funny.
But this time, reinvention is being sold as existential. A wave of departures means Lorne can frame the absence not as loss, but as strategy. He isn’t being abandoned—he’s curating a reset. The language is familiar: “retooling,” “reimagining,” “refocusing.” The subtext is even more familiar: the people leaving are doing so on their own terms, but we’ll pretend the show orchestrated it all along.
Let’s pause on Heidi Gardner, because she deserves more than a polite goodbye. She arrived in 2017 and quickly became the sort of cast member critics label “quietly indispensable,” which is a backhanded way of saying she wasn’t the star, but she kept the lights on. Her Weekend Update characters—Angel, the bratty Hollywood gossip correspondent, and Bailey Gismert, the YouTuber so tragically earnest it hurt—were not just sketches; they were mirrors held up to the kind of digital culture SNL never quite understood. Heidi made it work because she played them with sincerity so total it became absurd.
Her exit marks the end of a certain style of Update character: the archetype who wasn’t an impression, wasn’t a political figure, but a deeply human exaggeration of internet adolescence. Without her, Update risks becoming a rotation of pure impressions again, the least interesting form of satire: comedy by mimicry, critique by wig.
Then there’s Michael Longfellow, the stand-up who many speculated might inherit the Update desk. He had the right delivery: dry, arch, unfazed. But in an institution where Colin Jost has squatted on the chair for over a decade, inheriting the desk is more like waiting for a papal resignation. Longfellow didn’t get it. Instead, he got out.
Devon Walker and Emil Wakim, both newer, leave with less fanfare, but their exits matter because they represent the experiment SNL briefly tried: diversifying its stand-up pool, betting on voices that reflected something beyond the usual East Coast comedy pipeline. Their departures suggest the experiment was more gesture than commitment. You don’t retain diverse voices by framing them as expendable.
And in the writers’ room, Celeste Yim and Rosebud Baker leaving is its own small earthquake. Writers matter in ways the audience rarely credits, shaping not just sketches but the tone of entire seasons. Yim’s surrealism, Baker’s acidic honesty—gone. In their absence, the room risks defaulting back to safe scaffolding: impressions, monologues, generic “game show” setups. Reinvention by subtraction is not reinvention at all.
Lorne’s claim of reinvention raises a bigger question: what does SNL even need to be in 2025? Political satire? The show can’t compete with TikTok, which does sharper commentary in 15 seconds than a six-minute cold open ever achieves. Cultural parody? YouTube creators churn out sketches faster and often funnier. Star factory? The alumni pipeline still works—Bill Hader, Kate McKinnon, Bowen Yang—but it works by accident, not design.
What SNL is, in its 51st year, is a brand. The comedy may falter, the sketches may flop, but the logo still means something. It’s why hosts still say yes, even when the writers hand them a clunker about “airport sushi bar employees.” It’s why NBC keeps the lights on: because even a mediocre SNL garners the clips, the headlines, the tweets. Reinvention, then, isn’t about the comedy. It’s about the perception of comedy. It’s about convincing the audience, again, that what they are watching is still relevant.
And yet, there’s a truth buried in the churn. Every time someone leaves, it makes space. Heidi Gardner’s exit means some new performer will get airtime instead of being relegated to silent background roles. Longfellow leaving means someone else might inherit the dream of the Update desk. The writers’ room will hire new voices, who will pitch new sketches, which might—by sheer accident—create new cultural moments. That is the paradox of SNL: it thrives not despite turnover but because of it. Reinvention is not strategy. It is entropy.
The departures also highlight something the show never admits: people are tired. The cast cycle is brutal, the hours absurd, the pay insultingly low compared to the fame it generates. Staying more than five years is an act of masochism. Leaving is sanity. Lorne sells departures as reinvention, but they are simply labor catching up with its limits.
What makes the current moment different is timing. Coming off a 50th anniversary season, there was an expectation that the show would bask in nostalgia, celebrate continuity, and then gently carry on. Instead, it’s facing a reset. This isn’t the soft landing of a commemorative season—it’s turbulence. For a show built on the myth of immortality, turbulence looks like mortality.
The October 4 premiere will arrive like they all do: a cold open, a monologue, sketches alternating between passable and dire, Weekend Update holding the night together, a musical guest pretending the acoustics aren’t hostile. But beneath the surface, the audience will be watching for something else. They’ll be asking: does this feel new? Or does this feel like rerun culture repackaged as fresh?
There’s a temptation to say none of this matters. SNL has survived every purge, every exodus, every “this season will kill it” prediction. It has survived the departures of Eddie Murphy, of Tina Fey, of Kristen Wiig, of Bill Hader, of Kate McKinnon. It has survived the years when its political satire was daring, and the years when it was toothless. It has survived because NBC wants it to survive, and because America, against all evidence, likes the ritual.
But the show’s durability has also come at a cost. Reinvention has become theater. Departures are not processed as grief, or even critique, but as plot points in an endless drama. Heidi Gardner doesn’t just leave; her exit is cast as part of “Lorne’s reset.” Longfellow doesn’t just depart; he “opens the door” for a new Update possibility. Turnover is alchemized into narrative, so that the audience never has to confront the truth: maybe people are leaving because the show is exhausting, because the system is broken, because reinvention is a euphemism for churn.
Fifty-one seasons in, Saturday Night Live is less a comedy show than an institution performing the act of being a comedy show. Its real function is not to make people laugh, but to remind them that once a week, comedy can still be an event. Its sketches may go viral or vanish, its cast may come and go, its writers may burn out and leave. But the logo persists. The stage persists. Lorne persists.
And maybe that’s the most haunting reality of all: that SNL no longer reinvents itself. It simply reenacts the act of reinvention, season after season, cast change after cast change, like a sketch that doesn’t know when to end. The show isn’t dying. It’s living in a loop.