Please Don’t Destroy is out, who will be SNL’s next shorts team?
SNL just lost Please Don’t Destroy. Who will take over as America’s favorite digital short team? Will SNL finally break their white-dude streak?
Please Don’t Destroy is out at Saturday Night Live. Ben Marshall is moving to featured player, Martin Herlihy is staying on the writing staff, and John Higgins is done (Side note: where is this guy going? Is there already a TV deal that we just don’t know about yet?). Basically, no more PDD digital shorts when Season 51 finally starts up. And without Heidi to lean on…
That leaves a major hole. Because for the last two decades, SNL’s digital shorts haven’t just been filling slots at the end of the show, they’ve been the bulk of SNL’s viral reach.
Back in the mid-00s, The Lonely Island (Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone) practically reinvented what SNL could be. Their shorts (“Lazy Sunday,” “Dick in a Box,” “I’m On a Boat”) became instant internet canon. They (along with a healthy helping of Tina as Sarah Palin and classic SNL commercial parodies) proved SNL could thrive in the YouTube era. When Lonely Island left, the show struggled to keep the magic alive with spit-and-glue (Kyle Mooney and Beck Bennett’s videos, for example), but nothing had quite the same impact.
Smash cut to: Please Don’t Destroy. The trio brought back the feel of a cohesive, in-house digital team, delivering fast-paced absurdism that often went more viral than the live sketches themselves. For a while, it worked. But now PDD’s run is over, and history is repeating: SNL needs new blood.
Here’s the catch: every one of these digital teams (the Lonely Island, Mooney/Bennett, PDD) has been a small group of white dudes. Always. That pattern is impossible to ignore. We KNOW you noticed, Lorne!
So the real question for season 51: will SNL double down on the same formula, or finally branch out?
Because outside the show, sketch comedy has exploded into something much more diverse. Women, nonbinary comics, and creators of color are building their own digital collectives, putting out shorts that look as sharp as anything on SNL’s YouTube page—and in many cases, funnier. There’s no shortage of talent in live theaters across the country, on TikTok, on Instagram Reels…the new faces of digital comedy are impossible to ignore. The only shortage is who SNL decides to put on payroll.
And if they’re wondering where to look? A few years back, when PDD was hired as yet another white-dude trio, a certain project quietly launched to build digital sketch teams led by women and nonbinary comedians. It’s been thriving ever since, across New York, LA, Chicago, Austin, and even virtually. (Okay, enough playing coy: I’m talking about GOLD’s digital teams! The proof is in the pudding.)
The playbook is wide open. SNL can play it safe, cast another group of improv nepo boys, and keep the cycle going. Or it could do what it did in 2005 with Lonely Island: take a FUN risk, bet on NEW voices doing something that hasn’t been seen yet, and change the trajectory of the show.