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ANDY BRECKMAN:

The problem now is in that room. It’s who is or isn’t standing up to Lorne, who is maybe taking him on when his instincts are a little low-brow or, you know, too middle-of-the-road, or too safe — who is defending the conceptual writers’ pieces in that room. You can almost see by looking at the show what’s happening in that room, the room where they do the read-through on Wednesday nights. You can just see it. What’s happening, from the little I’ve seen of the show, is that nobody is defending the smarter pieces, because there always are smarter pieces being written. The read-throughs, by and large, have a great variety. They are, all of them, fifty sketches long. And there’s a lot of sketches that are great ideas but could use a little work to make them better, and with a little nurturing over the course of Thursday rewrite could be very strong. But there has to be somebody in the room championing those pieces. And I can just tell, just looking at the show now, that there’s nobody standing up to Lorne.

CHRIS PARNELL:

We find out each summer around the first of July if we’re coming back or not. So in the summer of 2001, when July first rolled around, SNL asked the actors waiting for news about their contracts if they could hold out for a couple more weeks because Lorne’s mom had passed away, and they asked for time for him to deal with that. And we’re all like, okay, fine, whatever. So two weeks go by and then they ask for another extension of another week. Meanwhile, I find out they’re auditioning new people for the cast, so I got in touch with the other people who were on the chopping block — Horatio, Maya, and Rachel — and then I heard Maya got brought back and Rachel and Horatio also. And then finally I talked to my manager, and he said, “Lorne’s not bringing you back.” So it was a pretty big shock. I thought I was doing all right there. I really thought we’d all come back, but it was me that didn’t.

I gave up my apartment in New York and moved back to L.A. I kept hearing that I might be coming back, and finally I just told my manager to quit telling me these tales, because he would talk to Lorne and he’d say to me, “Lorne says he might be bringing you back,” and I’d get my hopes up and nothing would happen and I’d be disappointed and depressed again. So I said, “Don’t tell me anything else unless they want to bring me back for real.”

Finally, around the end of February 2002, I was about to test for this pilot and found out that day that SNL wanted me to come back for the rest of the season. We were hoping to get a guarantee for the next season too, but we couldn’t get that. So I just finally decided that I love the job and I didn’t feel ready to go when I was let go. Lorne apologized for putting me through this waiting thing and this sort of limbo situation. He said he wasn’t trying to cause me any more pain. The only reference he made was to the budget, that it was a budget issue, and that they’d hired four new cast members. He just blamed it on the budget.

One of the things that made being fired bearable was that there was such a collective outpouring of shock from the writers and other cast members that seemed really sincere. It made me feel like I wasn’t just sort of living in some fairyland where I thought everything was okay and it wasn’t.

JON STEWART:

As much as I’d like to think I understand television production and understand what it takes to put on a show, I was absolutely knocked out by how they put that show on, just knocked out. The ability of each fiefdom to know their shit, do their shit, and execute at the level they execute was remarkable — really, really impressive to watch. It’s unprecedented, it really is.

You don’t really think about what effect your presence on the show is going to have. The shit comes all so fast, you don’t have time to think about reactions, and if you start thinking about it, about the effect, you’re sunk. All you can think about intuitively is, “That looks good, yeah, that’s funny,