Saturday Night Live has been going strong for more than half a century now, with creator Lorne Michaels still heavily involved in bringing the sketch comedy to late night each week in the 2025 TV schedule. While that presumably won’t change as this year winds down towards the 2026 TV schedule, a former SNL intern went off on the atmosphere allegedly created by Lorne Michaels behind the scenes. Weekend Update co-host Michael Che, who has been working on the show going back to 2013, clapped back… a couple of months later.
It’s no secret that producing SNL week in and week out is a stressful endeavor, so when a former Saturday Night Live intern comes forward to talk about that element of working on the show, it’s not particularly surprising. The way in which this former intern, named Megan McDermott, did it is more unexpected, and perhaps the reason why Michael Che felt the need to respond two months after she originally posted her three-minute video on Instagram.
Identifying herself as somebody who “interned at SNL my senior year of college and I have a degree in comedy writing from NYU’s film school,” McDermott posted a video addressing the sketch comedy’s cast turnover, which was significant over the summer with a number of exits, including longtime favorites Heidi Gardner and Ego Nwodim. She made this claim about why there’s pretty frequent turnover, saying:
Lorne Michaels loves power and he loves creating emotional crises in people, in the lives of people who are younger than him and receiving a type of attention and are destined to receive a type of attention that he never got and never will in front of the camera. It’s creepy when you think about it.
She went on to make claims about how the atmosphere behind the scenes created by Lorne Michaels at SNL negatively affects the cast members due to “processes… that have been in place since the ‘70s.” She said:
…Your mind and your body are going to break down. People go off the deep end at that place all the time. You’ve heard about and seen some of it, but you haven’t heard about and seen a lot of it. Happens literally all the time, even people who hold the party line when they leave and they’re like, ‘I loved it and it was the best time of my life. It’s a hard schedule. It’s an interesting life.’ They are miserable and they’re breaking down regularly.
While nobody outside of SNL can definitively confirm or deny her claims, McDermott is correct that former and current members of the SNL team have spoken about the stress of the job. Andy Samberg addressed the toll that it takes on cast members, and even feeling that intensity again when returning as a guest. Kenan Thompson opened up about his “very surreal and very stressful” audition (which led to him becoming the longest-running cast member in the story of the show).
Conan O’Brien, who worked at SNL as a writer years before becoming a successful late night host, shared that he felt like “there was a gun against my head all the time,” but credited Adam Sandler with lightening things up. Former writer and occasional host John Mulaney acknowledged the show’s "high-stakes and stressful” reputation, but also shared that it’s “also the most protected environment in entertainment” since they “don’t get notes."
But Michael Che, a current writer/cast member who has been part of SNL since 2013 and co-hosting Weekend Update with Colin Jost since 2014, roasted Megan McDermott’s claims more than two months after she originally posted the video. In the comment section, he wrote:
You learned all that getting coffee..?
This led to a minor scuffle in the comments, with McDermott responding that “it’s incredible what people will reveal in front of you when they treat you like you’re invisible,” while Che said that her claims “don’t sound bitter at all,” wrote “yap yap yap,” and followed up one of her pretty lengthy answers with to “check my word count. Then check yours.”
The rest of the comment section seemed pretty divided about what she claimed in her video. Take a look for yourself:
If you want to check out the current Season 51 cast in action, you can find new episodes of Saturday Night Live on – when else? – Saturdays at 11:35 p.m. ET on NBC, or streaming next day with a Peacock subscription.