SNL Alums Dish on Behind-the-Scenes Toxicity
Veteran entertainment journalist Maureen Ryan’s new book, Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood, exposes the troubled work environments behind some of our favorite TV series. Was there any doubt that she’d take on Lorne Michaels and his late-night behemoth, Saturday Night Live?
Ahead of Ryan’s book release, Vanity Fair published an excerpt in which Damon Lindelof owned up to the allegations of racism and toxicity on the set of Lost. On Tuesday, The Hollywood Reporter published another excerpt in which Ryan discusses the infamous all-consuming, pressure-filled work environment at SNL—and one former fan’s allegation that Horatio Sanz groomed her from the age of 15 before sexually assaulting her when she was 17. (In a 2021 statement, Sanz’s attorney Andrew Brettler called the allegations “categorically false”; THR notes the suit settled last fall.)
“Michaels’s long tenure as a power player and SNL’s enduring importance are intertwined with a culture of impunity within the world of comedy,” Ryan writes, “in which abuse and toxicity are not just permitted but often celebrated.”
Several reports and books over the years have documented the emotional turmoil behind the scenes at SNL, but as Ryan observes, none of the reporting ever seems to stick—least of all to its creator.
“I was living in a sort of Mad Max: Fury Road–style sink-or-swim environment that was utterly unconcerned with my well-being and my happiness and my sense of safety and just general holistic health,” one former SNL writer told Ryan, going on to say that “the environment could be incredibly unwelcoming, even for a straight white dude.”
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Janeane Garofalo, who famously left the show mid-year during the 1994-1995 season, remembered, on one occasion, waiting for Michaels for hours in his office. “You’ve shown him your weakness,” she recalled thinking. “You’ve shown him that you will wait four or five hours and that you’ll take it. There’s your first mistake,” the one that will ensure that “he can’t respect you.”
Describing the way Garofalo was treated during her time on the show, SNL writer Rosie Schuster told Ryan, “There’s no word for when you castrate a female… But that’s the feeling I get watching what’s happening to Janeane.” Cheri Oteri, who starred on the show from 1995 to 2000, also told Ryan that she was “a mess” for her first three years on the show: “There was no escape, so I was, like, crying all the time.” And former cast member Julia Sweeney said that while her first few years on the show were “fabulous” her last was “one of the worst years” of her life.
Over the years, multiple female SNL alums have described how they struggled in SNL’s work environment. Speaking with The Daily Beast’s Matt Wilstein during his podcast The Last Laugh, Melissa Villase?or, who left the show last year, said she’d decided to leave the show for her mental health, citing panic attacks. “I was struggling,” she said. “I always felt like I was on the edge of a cliff every week.”
Abby Elliott, a cast member from 2008 to 2012, also told Wilstein last year that her time on the show was “really rough,” and that she was running on little sleep and drinking to excess at the time. “I thought that I was really tough and could take it all,” Elliott said. “And now I’m dealing with it in therapy, but it was kind of this thing of, can I take another week of not being in sketches? ... I didn’t know any better then. So I was really putting myself through it and really putting pressure on myself.”
And in 2020, Michaela Watkins—who became the oldest woman hired at SNL in 2008 and was fired after one season—told The Daily Beast, “I feel like it was a marathon, but the week I got there, they cut my Achilles.” On being let go, she said, “It does play out rather coolly, if I’m being honest. Everybody was presented with contracts except for two people. It is a little rude.”
In Burn It Down, Ryan also spoke with Jane Doe, who filed a lawsuit against Horatio Sanz and NBC in 2021 alleging that Sanz had, as she put it in an interview with The Daily Beast, “abused me all over SNL.” She alleges that when she was 17, Sanz touched her breasts and genitals in front of several SNL cast members at one of the show’s afterparties. More than perhaps any other, the interview demands accountability.
“Sanz was clearly pursuing me, physically pursuing me across years of these parties,” Doe told Ryan. “If I saw my colleague doing that with a teenage fan, I would absolutely intervene or I would go up the chain of command and I would want something to be done.”
Representatives for SNL did not immediately respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment.
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