It’s hard to believe Liz Patrick has only been the director of SNL since 2022. She’s been in the business a long time, directing Ellen’s daytime show before it went off of the air in 2018, but she only took over SNL after longtime director Don Roy King retired in 2021. This resume means she was not on the set when the quaintly named "overstimulation" that was the Saturday Night Live 40th Anniversary Special aired back in 2015. But oh boy, she was around for SNL50.
It was hectic, to say the least. In fact, Patrick said as much in a recent interview, noting the events of the last 12 months at 30 Rock can’t begin to compare to the stress that piled on when SNL50 started being bandied about. I mean you had a very “dry”-mouthed Adam Sandler going viral for his singing bit. You had John Mulaney doing John Mulaney. You had longtime friends of the show like Paul Simon, Steve Martin and Paul McCartney. You had tons of former cast members and fresh names. And they all wanted to do something, anything.
Just ask Chevy Chase how he felt about being snubbed. So yes, Patrick confirmed to Gold Derby the past year on the show was a cake walk in comparison to all of… that.
For Season 50, there were so many eyes on the show. So, walking into Season 51, I felt like a lot of the pressure had been eased off our shoulders. … I went into Season 51 thinking, 'OK, this is going to be fun' [now] the pressure had been taken off a little bit.
That’s true even with some major changes to the SNL cast and the behind-the-scenes team. I was surprised and not surprised in a way. Of course, I know how intense the preparation must have been for SNL50. So many a-lister schedules had to be figured out, so many sketches had to be prepped only to be cut even at the last minute, and so many egos doubtless needed to be appeased. There was so much going on, for example, Ashley Padilla even recalled being mic'd only to be completely forgotten.
However, I would have thought pretty much every season of SNL has its stressors, and for me the big elephant in the room would have been Bowen Yang’s exit in the middle of the 2025-2026 TV schedule playing out. Of course, Liz Patrick will doubtless miss the old guard, but she has plenty of dealings with Yang outside of his NBC work. In fact, she’s directed the Las Culturistas Culture Awards two years in a row now, ‘ridiculous’ awards Tina Fey has given the former SNL star a lot of credit for.
They're both very talented. Bowen and I share a lot of the same music interests. You start forming these relationships with these people, and friendships, and you're just proud of them for succeeding.
So, she sounds happy to see people move on, though to note, I don’t put Chloe Fineman in the same stressful exit category despite her excellent effort and long tenure at SNL simply because we’ve had time to grieve it. She put in her work for the season and exited after 51 ended. To me, while it’s bittersweet to see her go, that’s not the same thing as Bowen Yang’s emotional rollercoaster of the last couple of years.
These were years where he dealt with an intense schedule traversing back and forth between New York and London for Wicked. The comedian was clearly going other places and just working Saturday Night Live in, but leaving in the middle of the season was still a shock for many.
Not that anyone blames him. Though if he’s wondering, his exit disrupted the status quo way less than Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds’ It Ends With Us joke seemingly did.
