Posted in: NBC, TV | Tagged: saturday night live, Shane Gillis, snl

SNL 50: Lorne Michaels on Shane Gillis Controversy, "Overreaction"

SNL EP/Creator Lorne Michaels addressed the Shane Gillis controversy and what he felt was an "overreaction" to Gillis' comments.

To understand the controversy surrounding actor/comedian Shane Gillis hosting the February 24th episode of NBC's Saturday Night Live Season 49, you need to go back to 2019. That's when Gillis was officially announced as joining the SNL cast – only for the long-running sketch comedy/music series to part ways with Gillis only days after recordings of racist, sexist, and homophobic comments surfaced as part of a YouTube channel called Matt and Shane's Secret Podcast.

"After talking with Shane Gillis, we have decided that he will not be joining SNL. We want SNL to have a variety of voices and points of view within the show, and we hired Shane on the strength of his talent as a comedian and his impressive audition for SNL," shared a spokesperson for SNL EP Lorne Michaels regarding the decision at the time. "We were not aware of his prior remarks that have surfaced over the past few days. The language he used is offensive, hurtful, and unacceptable. We are sorry that we did not see these clips earlier and that our vetting process was not up to our standard."

Five years later, Michaels would welcome Gillis back to host – and now, Michaels is sharing his thoughts on what he calls an "overreaction" to Gillis' previous comments and what he learned from the actor/comedian's return to SNL earlier this year. "We had a bad time when I added Shane Gillis to the cast [in 2019]. He got beat up for things that he'd done years earlier [racist and homophobic jokes], and the overreaction to it was so stunning — and the velocity of it was 200 Asian companies were going to boycott the show. It became a scandal, and I go, 'No, no, he's just starting, and he's really funny, and you don't know how we're going to use him,'" Michaels explained during an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

He continued, "And when he came back to the show last year [to host], we saw, 'Oh right, he's really talented, and he would've been really good for us.' Now, his life turned out well without SNL, but my point with it is everything became way too serious. It was like a mania. And the velocity of cancellation — and lots of people deserved to not be liked — it just became not quite the Reign of Terror, but it was like you're judging everybody on every position they have on every issue as opposed to, 'Are they any good at the thing they do?' I do think that period is winding down, and I believe the people who do awful things will still be punished."

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