Let's Talk About Chloe Troast
As it gears into its 50th anniversary, is SNL starting to show its age?
Chloe Troast, Saturday Night Live season 49’s flashiest featured player, announced on her socials that she wouldn’t be coming back for SNL’s 50th anniversary season.
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who is Chloe Troast, & why is this a surprise?
If you stepped out of the SNL lore for a season, Troast had a few great stand-apart sketches, most notably her solo sketch opposite Timothée Chalamet as “Little Orphan Cassidy.” Context: she’s crying about no one wanting to adopt her and wondering why, but of course it couldn’t be because she’s really old and well above legal adulthood.
For SNL, most featured players wait in a limbo to see if they will move up to main cast or get kicked off after one or two seasons. Alongside Troast, the show announced Molly Kearney, another featured player, will not return for the 50th season, while Devon Walker, Michael Longfellow, and Marcello Hernandez were promoted to the main cast. These four comedians joined the cast together two years ago, and this in-between for featured players is part of the casting machine. Keep an eye to see what happens to SNL’s newly cast featured players—Ashley Padilla, Emil Wakim and Jane Wickline—in two years from now. Odds are that only some, if any, move to main cast.
Leaving SNL doesn’t doom comedy careers. Many famous writers and comedians leave the show without making a mark or getting sketches on air because the comedian and the show recognize it’s not a mutual fit. Their comedy might be too odd in the sketch format SNL requires. Tim Robinson of I Think You Should Leave absurdity found his success as a total weirdo outside of the show’s constraints. Larry David and Julia Louis-Dreyfus overlapped as a writer and performer on SNL in their early careers, and neither felt that they found their place. Today, both comedians are synonymous with some of the most iconoclastic, influential comedy narratives: Seinfeld, Veep, and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
The reason that Troast is a case study is because she did excel on the show.
She wasn’t someone who couldn’t figure out how to work the machine. She understood what she had to do and aired sketches where she was the primary odd character. This strong of a first season could have risen her to main cast status, like Kate McKinnon and Kristen Wiig after their first seasons. (McKinnon won an Emmy her first season as a main player and her second year on the show, which shows the rarity and power of a strong first-season debut.)
Troast echoed Wiig and McKinnon by creating a character that associated her face with the show, a face you’d look to see in other sketches week after week.
And she was quickly beloved.
The show’s performers and writers as well as new fans are supportive in the social media responses to her departure. (Side note: Troast was in an NYU sketch group “Lisa” with the Please Don’t Destroy boys. Before she joined the show, she had a small bit role in their film.)
what does this mean for SNL?
Any SNL fan or owner of that great oral history, Tom Shales and Andrew James Miller’s Live from New York, can tell you what the cast and writers go through on their show weeks. During the fall and spring, the show programming will have three consecutive weeks on the shows. Three live shows brainstormed and written and produced live within one weeks. That’s somewhat insane, but they make it happen every season.
Within those show weeks, you have traditions rooted in the erratic, cocaine-fueled tradition of the founding members, like writing until the sun comes up on Wednesday morning before the guest reads through all the submitted sketches.
The origin of this show as the little-show-that-almost-fell-off-the-rails is central to its identity. The schedule is what worked when it aired, so it will be what the show does every week ad infinitum.
In the 50th anniversary year, the reckless origin story of the first live show is canonized as the Jason Reitman film, Saturday Night.
In theaters October 11, the movie reenacts the manic hours before the first live show’s premiere. Saturday Night Live, it reminds us, wasn’t always a given with a formulaic schedule. It almost never aired. That lore, the legend of this experiment-gone-right, is essential to the show’s ethos and, ironically, to its corporate brand.
Any show that survives 50 years will have to find a stable cadence to survive. SNL wants to keep its edge and its sanity at the same time.
Let’s set the record straight: I’m an SNL fan.
I grew up watching Saturday Night Live. When I come home for the holidays to my parents’ house in D.C., my mom will have Peacock autoplay the season’s episodes or holiday specials. I watched episodes at the end of Tina Fey’s run as Wiig, Bill Hader, Fred Armisen, and Maya Rudolph rose up the ranks. Seth Meyers wished Amy Poehler good luck on delivering her first child from the “Weekend Update” desk. Fey’s return as Sarah Palin was dissected and aired on projectors in my middle school classes.
I came of age when SNL was the top of the mountain. But it’s still funny. My family loves the Billie Eilish episodes. The Travis Kelce American Girl Doll Café sketch kills. This season’s catchphrase is “shoot.”
So I’m not here to repeat that annual argument of SNL is in a slump, and that it’s not as good as the good ole days. Everyone says this every year, though with a sketch show, you just need a few bright moments with the right people to go into the collective consciousness.
But I am curious why Troast isn’t coming back. She was a welcome breath of fresh air and welcomed according to her cast, her fans, and even herself (you don’t call a chaotic environment like that home unless it really, really works for you).
We can speculate all we want outside the door, but it doesn’t seem like (a) she was a disruptive personality creating drama between cast members, (b) her comedy didn’t work for the show, or (c) she pulled a Shane Gillis and did something inappropriate given that she made a statement that she, too, was surprised she wasn’t coming back.
So what happened?
Is it possible that SNL is less concerned with cultivating new talent and more interested in keeping a stable, consistent product?
the SNL cast as show IP
In Live From New York, a common theme among cast members was the seven year itch. If you were lucky enough to stay on the show until you were comfortable, you would want to leave around the seven year mark. Chevy Chase left after the first season. Will Ferrell only stayed for six seasons. Eddie Murphy only stayed for four seasons, but under the 1980s, shifted ownership from Lorne Michaels. Amy Poehler stayed for seven seasons.
Some of the current tenured cast members are on the cusp of their seven year itch, while others have made themselves at home.
Kenan Thompson: 21 seasons
In this economy, anyone who works for 20 years at any one place is insane. Given he has worked on 21 out of the show’s 50 seasons, he is almost as much of an SNL institution as Lorne Michaels.
In the apocalypse, he will still be doing live sketches, and that’s fine with me.
Kenan is a bit of an anomaly
Colin Jost & Michael Che: 10 seasons
Jost was a writer before a “Weekend Update” anchor during the era of John Mulaney.
Together, the pair are the longest running Weekend Update hosts heading into the 50th season.
They also have premiered a new showcase called New York After Dark on Peacock (a.k.a. the NBC streamer) for up-and-coming club comics
Heidi Gardner, Ego Nwodim, & Chloe Fineman: 7, 6, and 5 seasons
This trio plays absurd (yet beautiful) characters. Fineman is one of the best impressionists they’ve had on the show.
These three also do fashion shoots and commercials. (See Ego & Heidi in ELLE and Chloe at the Met Gala.) They compliment and support each other well in sketches. Nwodim also has a starring role in Peacock’s new show, Mr. Throwback.
Mikey Day: writer for 11 seasons, cast member for 8
Bowen Yang: 5 seasons
Yang has become a cultural icon inside and outside of the show, partially from his long-running podcast Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and partially from the weird ways he’s willing to transform his body on the show.
Andrew Dismukes: writing for 7 seasons, cast member for 4
James Austin Johnson: 3 seasons
Sarah Sherman: 3 seasons
If we use 7 years as a barometer for how the cast cycles through, some people may be coming up on their time to leave, and others might be hunkering in.
Recently departed cast members had created records for longest tenure for female cast members, like Kate McKinnon, Aidy Bryant, and Cecily Strong who all debuted on SNL in 2012 for season 37 and left between seasons 47 and 48.
These women were given more freedom to pursue straddle their responsibilities to the SNL cast while developing other opportunities, like Bryant’s Shrill or McKinnon’s Ghostbusters franchise.
For other casts, according to Live from New York, show producers acted protective about letting people leave the show, even in the summer hiatuses. This compounded cast member’s desire to leave and seek out other opportunities.
Now, there’s a shift. SNL’s cast members became movie stars alongside the rotating hosts. It added to the show’s ethos as a taste incubator. They became SNL surrogates, cross-promoting new movies in the summer before coming back to the show. (This is also why you see Peacock pulling SNL players into their shows as a corporate synergy tactic. Those who recognize them from the show will also see them as extensions of NBC.)
These longer cast tenures by McKinnon, Thompson, Strong, and Bryant—which overlapped the pandemic, a presumed and justified factor in staying put—pushed the younger players into the background.
Now those background players, like Yang or Fineman or Nwodim, are both veterans and newer to the spotlight. The pipeline is backed up. It takes longer to be recognized, unless you have a standout moment. The most recent cast members who stood apart did so with “Weekend Update” bits where they can play themselves and look directly into the camera as themselves, like Marcello or Sarah Squirm.
on top of the backed-up pipeline, new cast members compete with celebrity cameos
For the coming season, Maya Rudolph will reprise her Kamala, another eerie casting that plays in SNL’s favor as much as Palin did for Tina Fey. It’s borderline perfect, and you get to see one of your favorites come back to the show regularly. Steve Martin, one of Lorne’s earliest friends, recently rejected a request to cameo as Tim Walz, meaning someone else, celebrity or cast member, may fill the role.
Looking back to the last ten years of the show, since Trump’s early Republican candidate debates in 2015, the show producers have a habit of casting star-making presidential impressions outside of their cast to a celebrity.
This has changed the dynamic of the show.
SNL has an impact on the persona of the president: Will Ferrell’s George W. Bush showed the former president as a good ole boy who never realized how little he knew. Chevy Chase, in the beginning of the show, made Gerald Ford into a blustering clutz.
Instead of a new member adding their flavor to the cultural conversation around contemporary politicians like Trump, 30 Rock actor Alec Baldwin cemented himself as a residential cast member, became *the* impression of Trump in an oversaturated Trump-impression market, won Emmy’s, and raked in ratings. (Baldwin even co-wrote a book as this Trump persona.)
Though James Austin Johnson currently acts as the show’s resident Trump, he rides the wave of political comedy fatigue. Everyone from Comedy Central to your uncle has mastered a Trump impression. And most people would rather turn off the TV.
If the show’s founding purpose was about fostering new talent, casting outside of the show’s cast stands in conflict of that mission.
As much as I love and root for Maya Rudolph, this could be the opportunity of a lifetime for a new face (especially a Black woman) to enter Studio 8H.
In fact, Sydney Duncan is a New York comedian who has perfected a Kamala impression at indie comedy venues over the last few years. For a good impression, like Ferrell or Chase’s presidential campaigns, it’s not just how well you mimic a person’s tics but what personal essence you amplify that otherwise is hidden in the political facade. Duncan does a great job of showing Kamala as someone who is quick to please and say the empty things with a huge smile. The below video is a great snippet of this, especially that entrance dance and the crowd work.
The strategy behind casting fan favorites is smart for ratings. Who doesn’t want to see Maya Rudolph or Steve Martin do anything? I’d watch them eat grass. It underlines that SNL’s network is the Ivy League of the comedy world. With a phone call, anyone might volunteer to influence the public perception of today’s presidential candidates. It’s an absolute flex.
But it is kind of like when comedians can’t connect to their early fans because they have too much money. This new version is great, I’ll watch, but what about the original function of the show? To spotlight the comedians otherwise lost in the darkness, whose voices or talents might create their own waves?
now what?
Troast has captured the American attention, and the public wants to see more of her. There will be opportunities, depending on what she wants to do, and she leaves a good impression on the people she worked with. She will be another person who walked through those halls optimistic that SNL was her chance, and while it serves as her launchpad, she will be free to do work her characters into whatever format she wants. She’s in good company of people who forged their own comedic paths coming off this show.
Troast will be okay.
The larger question is whether the show has a talent retention or recognition problem. Is the show’s focus less on rising great people up the ranks and more with producing an easily digestible and recognizable show? What happens to newcomers, like Devon Walker, who spends years on the show waiting for their chance for air time?
Is it better to have long-running cast members who work as IP wearing SNL on their lapels as they bop between NBC and Peacock programming, who can safely return to 30 Rock as a home base while testing out new opportunities and embedding themselves into most elite comedy network in the world?
Or is it better to have a cast member give their all to the institution for less than a decade before they burn out, leave to make their Bridesmaids or Step Brothers or Barry, and make space for the bright-eyed newcomers?
SNL might be showing its age, but whether you watch live on Saturday or on socials Sunday mornings, we’ll keep watching and keeping an eye out for the newbies.
This is a Master class on SNL. Thank you
I missed a lot of more recent SNL episodes, I cant really say why? I wonder what percentage of the audience is Gen Z too. Because SNL lives on cultural commentary, perhaps they are in this weird position where its mostly millennials looking for a bit of the nostalgic feeling OR not vibing with the gen-z geared skits, and this leads them to try and stay with the older cast members... very very interesting take on this though! everyone always says the old days were better but honestly the Business Garden Inn skit with Billie Eilish is one of the best things I've ever seen in my life and we rewatch it frequently 😂