Jennifer Coolidge and Kieran Culkin SNL episodes scrapped over strike
Thanks to low wages for writers, Kieran Culkin and Jennifer Coolidge won’t be hosting SNL this season
The writers’ strike, caused by the lack of livable wages, job insecurity, streaming residuals, and access to healthcare by multi-billion dollar monopolies, has yet another TV casualty: Kieran Culkin and Jennifer Coolidge’s SNL episodes. While we’re sure we all need to sit down for a few minutes and collect ourselves, the news is only a surprise because we didn’t know Culkin and Coolidge were on deck. SNL had Culkin scheduled for May 13 and Coolidge for the May 20 season finale.
However, after the canceled Pete Davidson episode this week, April’s Ana De Armas episode stands as the show’s de facto finale. We shudder to think what kind of bad omen it is for the show when the season finale is in promotion of something called Ghosted, which presumably is about a supernatural dating app. We’ll never know for sure, though.
The news is another attempt to remind the general public what they’re “losing” due to the strike. Yet, it has almost nothing to do with the striking writers and everything to do with the networks that refuse to pay them. So as it stands, advertisers can direct their ire toward AMPTP, allowing this strike to go even deeper into SNL’s production schedule. In response to AMPTP’s first public rebuttal to the strike, former WGA President and current co-chair of the negotiating committee David Goodman said:
“It is clear to us in the AMPTP proposals that they are coming after writing staffs that they are not interested in the longevity of writing careers. They want to turn it into a gig economy, a gig job. All of their proposals from AI to the day rate for comedy variety writers to dismissal of all the concerns we raised about free work for screenwriters, are signaling us that they have a plan to devalue writers so that less writers are hired and more pressure’s placed on those individuals that they do hire. We can’t stand for that. Nothing they said in this in these remarks, do anything to tell me otherwise.”
It’s worth noting that people probably would watch both episodes. After all, Kieran Culkin has never been better in this season of Succession. Additionally, this would’ve been Coolidge’s hosting debut, which says a whole lot about Saturday Night Live, considering Coolidge has been among America’s great comedians for the last 20 years. But it takes a long time for America’s institutions to catch up with the rest of the country. Honestly, there should’ve been some more direct action around getting Coolidge on the show earlier.
[via Deadline]