Former SNL cast member Rob Schneider has said he thinks Kate McKinnon’s cover of ‘Hallelujah’ marked the moment the show was “over”.
Schneider has said he believes the long-running sketch series went downhill after the 2016 US presidential election, during which McKinnon played Hillary Clinton.
After Trump was elected, one episode saw McKinnon as Clinton sing ‘Hallelujah’ in character for a cold open of the show.
“I hate to crap on my old show,” Schneider said of the scene in an interview with The Blaze‘s Glenn Beck. “I literally prayed, ‘Please have a joke at the end. Don’t do this. Please don’t go down there.’
“And there was no joke at the end, and I went, ‘It’s over. It’s over. It’s not going to come back.’”
Schneider said he thinks SNL and other late-night shows are “indoctrinating” audiences, adding: “You can take the comedic indoctrination process happening with each of the late-night hosts, and you could exchange them with each other. That’s how you know it’s not interesting anymore.”
Kate McKinnon left SNL at the end of season 47 earlier this year, alongside Pete Davidson, Aidy Bryant and Kyle Mooney.
Discussing her decision to leave, McKinnon recently said: “I thought about it for a very long time, and it was very, very hard.
“All I ever wanted to do in my whole life was be on Saturday Night Live. So, I did, I loved it, I had the best decade, and then I was just like, my body was tired, and I felt like it was time.”
Elsewhere, a UK version of Saturday Night Live is reportedly in the works at Sky. The network is owned by Comcast, the same parent company who owns NBC.
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