Topline
Saturday Night Live added four new cast members to its upcoming 48th season, the show announced Thursday, after losing seven big name stars including Kate McKinnon and Pete Davidson.
Bowen Yang, Lorne Michaels, and Kate McKinnon pose with the Emmy for Outstanding Variety Sketch … [+]
Key Facts
Comedian Marcello, Molly Kearney, Michael Longfellow and Devon Walker will join the cast as featured players.
It’s not clear if any more cast members have departed the show or if any featured players have been promoted to repertory players.
Hernandez has headlined for Gilbert Gottfried; Kearny appeared in the new Amazon Prime series A League Of Their Own; Longfellow performed at Netflix’s Netflix Is A Joke comedy festival; Walker has written for Big Mouth and was recently named to Vulture’s list of comedians you should and will know in 2022.
What To Watch For
Season 48 Of SNL premieres on October 1. New episodes will also air on October 8 and October 15.
Key Background
At the end of Season 47 in the spring, it was announced that longtime cast members McKinnon, Davidson, Aidy Bryant and Kyle Mooney were departing the sketch comedy series. Melissa Villaseñor, Alex Moffat and Aristotle Athiras also left the show earlier this month. And producer Lindsay Shookus, who worked on SNL for 20 years, left in August. SNL won Outstanding Variety Sketch Show at Monday’s Emmys.
Tangent
Earlier this summer, creator Jake Novak went viral on TikTok for making a video about wanting to join SNL’s cast. The song, which now has 5.8 million views, was met with vitriol for being cringeworthy. Novak stopped posting content after receiving thousands of hateful messages and comments. “There was an episode just within the last several days where I had friends thinking they had basically received a death threat toward me, and were not able to get in touch with me and thought I might be dead because of this, and that’s not okay,” he told Vulture last month.
Further Reading
Three More ‘SNL’ Cast Members Departing Show Ahead Of Season 48 After Loss Of Stars (Forbes)
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisadellatto/2022/09/15/snl-adds-four-new-featured-players-members-after-cast-exodus/