The start of Saturday Night Live’s 26th season brought with it two major storylines: a presidential race that would keep the country—and the show—transfixed well past Election Day, and a new era taking shape inside Studio 8H.
The Saturday Night Network’s latest entry in its Everything You NEED to Know About Saturday Night Live series looks back at a season defined by unusually high stakes.
For Jon Schneider, who co-hosts and co-produces the series with James Stephens, the challenge was “figuring out how to best cover maybe the most consequential election to that point—especially for SNL.”
“The ’96 election with Bob Dole wasn’t so exciting for SNL,” Schneider tells LateNighter. “But this one was really exciting. [Jim] Downey, who had been let go a couple of seasons earlier, gets brought back in to write political sketches. Then we get Darrell Hammond and Will Ferrell at the height of their powers, showing off their impressions of a very monotone Al Gore versus a frat boy George Bush.”
Those impressions quickly became central to the season. Hammond’s Gore and Ferrell’s Bush gave SNL two sharply defined characters to play with during a race that only grew more dramatic as Election Day approached—and then kept going long after.
The show’s political coverage produced some of the season’s most enduring material, from Gore’s “lockbox” to Bush’s “strategery.” What might have been a few weeks of election-year sketches instead became a monthslong opportunity for SNL to track a national debacle in real time.
Meanwhile, SNL was going through a generational transition of its own. Tina Fey, already the show’s head writer, joined the cast and replaced Colin Quinn at the “Weekend Update” desk alongside Jimmy Fallon, giving the segment its first anchor duo in nearly 20 years. As Schneider notes, Fey’s growing role would put a “major stamp on the entire show.”
There were other changes, too. With Survivor becoming a ratings sensation on CBS, SNL experimented with Thursday-night editions under the banner SNL Primetime Extra. And the cast itself continued to shift, with Quinn, Tim Meadows, and Cheri Oteri gone at the start of the season, and Molly Shannon—then the show’s longest-serving female cast member—departing midway through the year.
Schneider calls Shannon’s exit “one of the biggest dominoes to drop” as SNL moved into a new era.
“We’re entering the millennium now,” Schneider says. “What’s the show going to look like into the 2000s? How do we continue to do this and make it great? What does the next era of the show look like?”
Those questions would become more urgent the following season, when SNL returned in September 2001 to a changed world. But Season 26 showed the program entering that period with a renewed sense of cultural relevance, a powerful political engine, and a new creative identity beginning to form under Lorne Michaels.
Watch the Saturday Night Network’s Story of Season 26 at the top of this post. Past episodes of Everything You NEED To Know About Saturday Night Live are available on the SNN’s YouTube channel.
