When Saturday Night Live airs it’s season 47 final episode tomorrow evening, it will mark the end of an era for four of its cast members as Kate McKinnon, Aidy Bryant, Kyle Mooney and Pete Davidson are expected to depart the cast.
Deadline is reporting from sources that “that there may be a big group goodbye, featuring all four the departees, at the end of tomorrow night’s episode.” Natasha Lyonne is set to host tomorrow night’s season finale, with musical guest Japanese Breakfast.
The quartet’s departures might very well be well-timed exits. Currently the show’s cast features 21 members between both main cast and featured players. In addition to the four leaving, there are another four cast members who also have been on the show for eight or more seasons – Michael Che, Colin Jost, Cecily Strong and Kenan Thompson. And at a time when the cast is so big that some members are struggling to get air time, maybe the departure of these four will allow some of the more junior cast members their time to shine.
The departures don’t come as much of a surprise anyway. Davidson has been practically a non-entity on the show this season as he has been off working on other projects including the feature film The Home. He also has the upcoming Peacock series Bupkis, which he co-created and will be in starring in opposite Edie Falco. McKinnon and Bryant have also been MIA for part of the just concluding season. Bryant missed a chunk of episodes at the beginning of the season while she was working on the third season of her Hulu series Shrill, while McKinnon was out to film the fictionalized Tiger King scripted series Joe Vs Carole in which she is playing Carole Baskin. SNL executive producer Lorne Michaels is involved Bupkiss and Shrill which goes a ways to explain why the show would be lenient to such absenteeism amongst some of its regulars.
