If it seems like Lorne Michaels swiped left on some Saturday Night Live cast members before you even got to decide if they were dating material (which one is Luke Null again?), you’re absolutely right. A jaw-dropping 54 cast members have lasted only a single season — or less. Ranking them might seem like an impossible task since there’s a reason most of these performers didn’t stick around (i.e., it wasn’t working). But cue the Mission: Impossible theme: I’m giving it a go anyway, sorting our one-hit wonders into eight tiers within our definitive ranking.
Have you seen these cast members? Because honestly, we can’t quite remember them, as they didn’t leave much of an impression on our comedy brains. And because they mostly toiled in the pre-YouTube era, there’s not much out there to jog our memories either.
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With Chevy Chase, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd off to the movies, a bunch of SNL writers moved into the featured cast for a few episodes in Season Five. Then when Michaels and every cast member abandoned ship, an entirely new bunch of faces showed up for the disastrous Season Six. Only Joe Piscopo and Eddie Murphy would see Season Seven.
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Starting in the mid-2010s, SNL inexplicably expanded its cast size to 20 or more players (compared with the original cast’s seven). The laws governing space and time ensured that some of those 20 would rarely if ever see the stage. Were these seldom-used cast members any good? Since they never got a real shot, who knows? But they almost all had a moment.
Sometimes when you bring in seasoned comics (see Season 10, below), it works. Sometimes, as with these seven funny people, the fit is all wrong.
Cast members in this tier were clearly talented — most of them went on to become huge comedy stars. But at this point in their burgeoning careers, they just weren’t ready for the big time.
Over the years, a number of cast members did serviceable work over the course of a season, only to find themselves in the unemployment line come summer. These funny people deserved another season to prove they belonged.
The post-Lorne Michaels years were a wasteland (save for the flashes of Eddie Murphy brilliance). Producer Dick Ebersol had enough — he went to NBC chief Brandon Tartikoff with a proposal to bring in some comedy heavyweights. The recruited stars agreed to join up for a year and pretty much killed it all season long.