It’s the middle of the summer, and for Saturday Night Live fans that means one thing: A lengthy round of speculation about who might depart the show before the beginning of the next season, which will most kick off around the tail-end of September.
Usually, we don’t know much about that until news starts trickling in around mid-to-late August at the earliest (beyond the occasional season-finale sendoff). However, Chloe Fineman got a jump on that news cycle; she didn’t get a big goodbye sketch back in May, but subsequently decided that fulfilling her seven-season contract would be enough, and announced last week that she wouldn’t be returning to the show in the fall.
Fineman was the longest-tenured female cast member on SNL, and further cast shake-ups aren’t necessarily expected for Season 52. With a somewhat smaller cast than recent years, and many of the biggest veterans of the show cleared out, the focus should probably be more on who might be added. There are currently 13 remaining regular cast members (plus Michael Che and Colin Jost, who mostly just do Update and, in Jost’s case, one recurring political impression), and of that baker’s dozen, only four are women — and all of those women are white, something that, prior to Season 51, hadn’t been true since the late 2000s! It would be pretty nutty if the show didn’t hire at least one woman of color for Season 52.
Still, that doesn’t mean the show will only be adding cast members come fall. With five freshmen players in Season 51, and a few decade-plus veterans still in the cast, there’s still room for change. Around this time last year, I assessed the ten likeliest departures, and though my final prediction for which three cast members would be gone were way off, five of those spitballed ten are nonetheless not on the show anymore. (I admit, though, that I didn’t seen Bowen Yang‘s midseason departure coming last year.) So here’s an equivalent look at the Season 51 cast members least likely to return, with Fineman providing the equivalent of a free bingo square at the top. Odds are that the majority of these folks will be back next year, but let’s speculate anyway!
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Michael Che & Colin Jost
Look, any assessment of who might leave Saturday Night Live has to include almost anyone who’s been on the show for well over a decade (except Kenan; obviously not Kenan). But after several seasons where it seemed like Jost & Che were ready to pack it in as a Weekend Update team, I’ve given up expecting the show to actually change anchors. I assume the job is available for as long as these guys want it, and it sounds as if Jost in particular is pretty adept at convincing the more reluctant Che to stick around. Jost, in turn, seems pretty likely to have his eye on the Lorne Michaels show-running job, which might be incentive for him to stick around indefinitely. So why are they even on this list at all? Just my incredulity that the longest-running Weekend Update anchors in history are becoming two of the show’s longest-running cast members full stop.
Prediction: Another season of increasingly tired joke-swaps and beyond-tired women’s-basketball jokes at the Update desk.
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Mikey Day
Another cast member who’s here sheerly by the number of seasons he’s logged, Mikey Day would be going into his 11th season as a cast member and 14th overall (he started as a writer only back in Season 39). It’s Day’s writing experience that makes him particularly valuable to the inner workings of the show. He’s a constant utility player on-screen who frequently knocks out buzzy, viral, or otherwise killer sketches behind the scenes. (You have to wonder if, like Jost, he might be in the running for the job of Future Lorne.) Based on his importance to the show, it feels like his departure would be more ceremonious. Then again, the company of SNL players who have extended beyond 10 seasons without being an Update anchor is pretty rarified. It’s pretty much just Kenan, Darrell Hammond, Fred Armisen, and, just slightly over 10 seasons with an extra half-season each, Cecily Strong and Kate McKinnon. Just saying: Strong did a mid-season goodbye once she passed the decade mark.
Prediction: Day goes for the exceedingly rare 12-season run, putting him on the air through Season 53.
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Andrew Dismukes
Literally my favorite guy in the current cast, Dismukes, like Day, had several writing-only seasons before he became an on-air presence in Season 46. He’s now a de facto veteran, with six seasons as a cast member under his belt (only Jost, Che, Kenan, and Day have more). You have to imagine he’ll at least fill out the standard seven seasons of his contract, and might even go a little longer like his fellow genius-weirdo Will Forte did. But he’s also such a wonderfully unassuming presence that it would be easy enough to imagine him doing a quiet between-seasons exit rather than a splashy goodbye.
Prediction: We get at least one more season of Dismukes, as a treat.
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Jeremy Culhane
Of the three new white-dude featured players from Season 51, Jeremy Culhane has most distinguished himself as an offbeat, versatile sort of white dude. It took a little while, as it often does, and the show has let solid talent slip through its fingers too early before. But if nothing else, won’t they fear the wrath of Mr. On-Blast?! (I admit, I don’t really get Mr. On-Blast. But Culhane has been funny in lots of other stuff, too, and the audience seems to like this one.)
Prediction: Mr. On-Blast returns!
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Ben Marshall
Ben Marshall took the unusual path of working as a writer on the show for several seasons, and appearing regularly as part of the Please Don’t Destroy videos with his buddies Martin Herlihy (who still writes at SNL, at least as of last season) and John Higgins (who left the show after Season 50), before taking a featured-player gig last season. Despite an overall familiarity based on his PDD material, Marshall wound up coming across more or less like a typical first-year featured player, taking lots of bit parts, scoring some laughs here and there, but rarely taking center stage of a particular sketch. He’s obviously funny, but does the show really need another utility player? Presumably his skills as a writer — PDD wrote a ton of great sketches for other cast members during their time on the show — give him an edge over some of the other newbies.
Prediction: Marshall does another season, though I’m not sure if he should be settling in for a lengthy Day-style run.
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Kam Patterson
Patterson seemed to struggle to find his footing in his first season on the show, probably owing to his experience coming from stand-up rather than sketch comedy. He also made headlines (at least in the SNL fandom) for talking specifically about the show not being for him during a stand-up routine. (Only fair to say, though, that his related joke about successive hosts’ claim to fame being in Top Gun 2 is solid.) The usual ooh-he’ll-get-in-trouble talk bubbled up from that, though I tend to think Michaels wouldn’t much care about what Patterson is joking about in his stand-up, at least judging by Pete Davidson’s long and successful run on the show. No, Patterson is more likely to leave the show because of exactly what he joked about: He doesn’t really seem like a fit, he doesn’t really seem to particularly like it, and he doesn’t have much experience beyond stand-up to draw upon. Still, there’s a tendency to give featured players more than one season to prove themselves, and he’s a lively enough presence… Plus, he, Ben Marshall, and SNL golden boy Marcello Hernández are in a new Netflix movie — this Friday, July 24’s 72 Hours —together. That has to count for something.
Prediction: His chumminess with some of the cast lets him squeak by.
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Tommy Brennan
I think one of the keys to figuring out whether a featured player might make it on SNL isn’t necessarily what they’re doing during their first season, but what you can picture them doing in subsequent seasons. I can picture Kam Patterson or Ben Marshall in future sketches or Update pieces, and fellow freshman Veronika Slowikowska is so easy to picture doing five to eight seasons on the show that she doesn’t even make this list. Tommy Brennan, though… Sorry to say, it’s hard to see where this affable white-dude stand-up fits into the show going forward. That doesn’t mean he’s doomed or untalented; he just doesn’t seem like he particularly belongs in a sketch-comedy ensemble. I’d love to be proven wrong, but if anyone screams one-and-done from the current cast, it’s this guy.
Prediction: We may have seen the last on him, at least in terms of live TV.
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Chloe Fineman
Given that she’s announced her departure from the show, Fineman seems highly unlikely to return. (It’s also difficult to picture her returning to host, for whatever that’s worth.) Let us remember her as a genuine weirdo in addition to an enthusiastic impressionist. Pour one out for Ooli.
Final Prediction: Fineman and Brennan won’t be back in the fall, and if the show scouts a particularly promising new batch of talent, Patterson could follow them out.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
