For Saturday Night Live director Liz Patrick, Season 51 was a breeze compared to last year. “For Season 50, there were so many eyes on the show,” Patrick told Gold Derby. “So, walking into Season 51, I felt like a lot of the pressure had been eased off our shoulders.”
Having pulled off not just SNL‘s 50th season, but the SNL50 anniversary special as well, Patrick was excited to get back to work with “some great new cast members who had started to get their footing” and were “exploding a little bit more,” especially Ashley Padilla and Marcello Hernández. “I went into Season 51 thinking, ‘OK, this is going to be fun’ [now that] the pressure had been taken off a little bit.”
Patrick has won three Emmys for directing SNL: one for SNL50: The Anniversary Special (2025) and two for the mothership (shows hosted by Steve Martin-Martin Short in 2023 and Ryan Gosling in 2024). She’s nominated this year for the episode hosted by Olivia Rodrigo, featuring the soap opera spoof “Edge of Destiny.”
“It was a really ambitious sketch,” says Patrick of “Edge of Destiny,” which required multiple cast members to fall down a flight of steps. “I always enjoy a challenge,” and when she first read the sketch, she knew it would be difficult to create that stunt on live television. Initially, the writers had wanted to use stunt doubles or possibly even mannequins, but at the read-through, Patrick and producer Steve Higgins started asking if there was a way to “shoot this a little more creatively?”
It was Higgins who came up with the idea of turning the staircase sideways, which led Patrick to huddle with the production designer to create “the crudest model I could” to show how it could be done. Using a water bottle and two pieces of paper, Patrick devised a visual sleight of hand that would have the actor move against a traveling wall and staircase to make it appear as if they were falling. Patrick also rotated the camera to better sell the illusion of an upright actor tumbling sideways. “It was a really fun idea, and it was really something that was fun to execute,” Patrick says.
Another sketch that required some creative problem-solving was “White Castle Drive-Thru,” with Jane Wickline and Veronika Slowikowska playing a pair of teenagers who keep circling a White Castle so they can ask out the cute drive-thru worker (Harry Styles). “That was a very ambitious live sketch,” Patrick explains. “How do we show a car pulling up to a drive-thru and then actually taking off?”
The answer: “We used half a car, we had the drive-thru window, and our stagehands made it look like the car was peeling out. Then we’d cut to footage of it driving away, and then I’d cut to the inside of the restaurant and back to the window as it was re-approaching. Again, I love a challenge. I love something like that. It’s super creative that they thought of this idea, and then it’s like OK, how do we bring this to fruition, and how can I make it look the best that it can? [It] makes you think outside the box, and that’s part of the fun of what we do.”
Each year, several SNL sketches don’t make it to air. “Cast List” was written and cut for time before Patrick’s tenure began on the show; the sketch was revived for this year’s season finale with Will Ferrell. To prepare, Patrick looked back at how her predecessor, Don Roy King, set the sketch up to see “what worked” and “what didn’t work,” applying that “to what we were doing” with their revised version. This time, “Cast List” made the broadcast.
There are a lot of changes that happen between the dress rehearsal and the moment cameras roll at 11:30 p.m. ET, and those alterations depend on everything from who the host is to what’s going on in the world. “It’s part of my job to make those changes happen,” Patrick explains, “and hopefully it doesn’t create a domino effect where it throws camera off, or it throws audio off, or lighting, or everyone, for that matter.”
One big change this year came with a cold open featuring Donald Trump (James Austin Johnson) handing out the first annual Trump Awards alongside Elon Musk (Mike Myers). “We had lost I think two or three awards from what we did in dress rehearsal,” Patrick recalls, not to mention the order of the awards and who was sitting with whom. “It came to me in pieces,” says Patrick, who had to figure everything out on the fly during the live telecast. Fortunately, she and her team had plenty of experience working on real awards shows, so she told everyone to “just buckle in and make it work.”
“We just kind of flew by the seat of our pants there, [but] that’s part of live television, and part of my background coming from MTV and doing so many live events for them. You can have a plan, and then you can watch it all be ripped up and then hopefully still put it together without anyone noticing.”
Patrick also shouted out the guest hosts this season, beginning with SNL vets Ferrell and Amy Poehler. “I always enjoy a former cast member coming back,” Patrick says, calling them both “kind humans.” “They know what it takes to put on a show … [and] they know the amount of pressure I’m under to make this all happen, so it’s like they’re coming back to college, in a way, to help these kids along.”
Then there are first-timers like Connor Storrie, who earned an Emmy nomination for his inaugural SNL outing. His episode included the complex “Ice Skating” sketch, featuring a cameo from his Heated Rivalry co-star Hudson Williams. “We ended up using a video wall, and it was just a lot of playing around with the configuration of the camera and the pony wall that you’d see at an ice skating rink.” Using footage shot at the famous skating rink outside 30 Rock, Patrick created something that was “really cool” and “very simple at the same time.”
One person who’s a fan of Patrick’s work is Steven Spielberg, who’s good friends with Lorne Michaels and often stops by to watch tapings just to see how the show is put together. “It’s a little nerve-wracking,” Patrick admits, but it’s also “super cool,” especially when she got to work with Spielberg on the SNL50 special. “I grew up with Steven Spielberg movies. I’m a huge fan and honored that somebody like that comes by.” The same goes for Christopher Nolan, who stopped by the control room while getting a tour of NBC. “He was very kind,” Patrick recalls, “and evidently is a huge SNL fan.”
Every year there are cast departures, and this season saw the exit of both Bowen Yang and Chloe Fineman. “They’re both very talented,” Patrick says.
“Bowen and I share a lot of the same music interests,” something they discovered after running into each other at a Lady Gaga concert. Yang’s farewell episode with Ariana Grande and Cher “was really special and sweet, and I really enjoyed working with them.” Patrick loves working with Yang so much that she’s directed the Las Culturistas Culture Awards two years in a row, and is excited to see him onstage in his Broadway debut, Oh, Mary! “You start forming these relationships with these people, and friendships, and you’re just proud of them for succeeding,” she adds.
That’s true of Fineman as well, who’s “so talented in the impressions she can do, and shifting from one tone to another very quickly.” Although she’s sad to see them leave, “you’re super excited for them” and “proud” to see them blossom outside of Studio 8H.
