SNL Fired Shane Gillis Before His First Show. Now He's a Regular.
Gillis hosts on October 10 with Rosalía as musical guest. It's his third time hosting, which is three more episodes than he ever worked there as a cast member.
By the Heckle Desk · · 2 min readThis week, Saturday Night Live announced that Shane Gillis will host the October 10 episode, with Rosalía as musical guest. It's Gillis's third time hosting. Rosalía has been on before too, so it's a reunion of sorts, the way a family reunion is a reunion: half the people are glad to see each other and the other half are watching the door.
Now here's the part that makes the whole thing worth writing about. In 2019, SNL hired Shane Gillis as a cast member. Then, a few days later, after some old podcast clips turned up, they let him go. He never appeared in a single episode. Most men who get fired don't get invited back to host. Most men who get fired don't even get invited back to the Christmas party, and they shouldn't, because they'll steal the shrimp.
But Gillis went off and did something unusual. He got enormously popular without them. He built a crowd big enough to fill arenas, and now the place that let him go keeps calling him up, like a man who sold his farm in 1980 and keeps driving past it, looking at the oil wells.
There's a moral in this, and I'll try to find it before the column ends. It used to be that SNL was the front door to show business. You knocked, and if they let you in, you were somebody. Now there are a hundred doors, and most of them are podcasts, and a fellow can walk in through any of them. SNL hasn't closed its door. It has simply discovered that the people it turned away found the side entrance and came back through the lobby with a crowd.
As for Rosalía, she is one of the most daring musicians alive, and she will be sharing a stage with a man whose act is largely about Pennsylvania. That is the kind of pairing they used to arrange only at weddings, when the band canceled.
My prediction: he'll mention the firing in the monologue, the clip will be everywhere by Sunday, and someone at NBC will look at the ratings and decide forgiveness was their idea all along. That's how forgiveness usually works. Somebody does it, and somebody else takes credit.