They’re not naïve at Saturday Night Live, so I think they understood that this had the potential to be discussed on a broad level. But sometimes things happen, I mean, they become bigger than you could imagine. You think you know your business and you think you know your audience, you think you know how people could react. Sometimes with companies, sometimes it happens with the White House. Do you think Lorne and the show weren’t prepared at how incessant the media onslaught was going to be over the whole conversation last fall about not having a black female cast member? You talked a little bit about the Internet and the media coverage. So she was a total outlier, right? But now it’s totally reversed itself, which is that there’s lots of people that have families or significant others and children, and they don’t need to be going to the after-after-party, and I also think that they believe that the show is more of a meritocracy, so if they come up with something good on a Monday and a Tuesday and work on it and share it at a table read on Wednesday or whatever, it doesn’t matter whether or not they. It used to be, of the original seven, everybody was going crazy and going to the bar and going out, but Jane Curtin would go to the opera with her husband. I mean, just think about what a fundamental shift that is, just in terms of how people organize their lives. And it was Mother’s Day and all the women came together, and it’s like, do you think those people are going to go to the after-after-party that starts at 3 a.m.? They were all mothers, and they went home to their kids and to their husbands. I was looking at the Betty White episode the other day. No one spoke to me for the first week.” That kind of stuff. And they’re friends, and you want them to succeed, as opposed to-so many cast members have told me through the years, “I didn’t know anyone when I came there. So when you came to the show, or when somebody came back, these were people that you’d known for a long time. In earlier eras, there wasn’t this feeling of sisterhood or brotherhood that exists now, and I think part of it was there were a lot of friendships that existed before Saturday Night Live. It wasn’t like they were throwing elbows at each other, but there was competition. Either that or they didn’t really perceive both the 90 minutes of the show and the world of SNL as having unlimited space for everyone. There were people in previous eras who saw it as kind of a binary existence- either I get on or they get on. I’ve talked to people, and they don’t describe it as not being competitive anymore it’s just a different sort of competitive. Because it’s not like you walk into the room and Lorne says, “Okay, this is what we’re going to do,” and then everybody just sits there. And so Lorne, in his mind, might say, “If Seth feels strongly about it, then I’ll do it that way.” But I think it’s a really interesting balance that’s achieved in that room. Now, there have been times where people like Seth or Tina or other people have had maybe a little bit more influence, and they might have had more influence than others who have been in those roles before. You can’t have, like, a three-headed monster in a room like that. But I think there’s a great balance between people being able to advocate and then ultimately everyone knowing that this is not a democracy and Lorne is going to decide in the end. Because remember, time’s wasting the director, the cue-card people, everybody needs to understand these answers. And you have to make your case, and you have to make it quick. It’s a place for advocacy and it’s a place for passion. It’s interesting because it goes to the nature of who Lorne is, and the type of leader he is.
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