Lorne Michaels didn’t just give his blessing to Sunday night’s TV-themed “Washington’s Dream” sketch at the Emmys—he lent the show his writers.
Longtime Saturday Night Live writing partners Mikey Day and Streeter Seidell—who penned both of the “Washington’s Dream” sketches when Nate Bargatze hosted SNL—were brought on as writers for Sunday’s Emmycast, along with fellow SNL scribe Mike DiCenzo.
Emmys executive producers Jesse Collins, Jeannae Rouzan-Clay, and Dionne Harmon told reporters backstage that the sketch had been in the works for three to four weeks, and that they had sought and received Michaels’ approval ahead of time.
As LateNighter has reported, it’s not the first time Day and Seidell have collaborated with Bargatze outside of SNL. The duo also wrote for Bargatze’s Lorne Michaels–produced CBS holiday special in 2024, contributing a Christmas nativity scene–themed version of “Washington’s Dream.”
This time around, Day appeared on screen alongside fellow SNL cast members James Austin Johnson and Bowen Yang as the bewildered lab assistants to Bargatze’s Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of television, who spends the sketch grandly predicting the strange and silly future of the medium he’s just created.
Saturday Night Live ended up being feted more directly later in Sunday night’s broadcast when the show won its record 113th Emmy Award, for Oustanding Variety Special (Live) for SNL50: The Anniversary Special.
Accepting the award on behalf of the show, Lorne Michaels thanked NBC and Comcast for supporting the ambitious two-year production of the anniversary special, quipping that they told him, “We don’t care what it costs, as long as it’s good”—before adding, “Maybe they didn’t say that. Maybe that’s just the way I heard it.”
