“I still want to kill her to this day”: the ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketch that started a blood feud
Since its inception over 50 years ago, Saturday Night Live has always been a cutthroat environment, with performers and writers battling for supremacy to bring the best sketches to the airwaves.
At the head of the table sits Lorne Michaels, who has final approval over what does and doesn’t make it to air. However, that doesn’t mean there can’t be the odd spot of backstabbing or sabotage, with the competitive spirit that’s defined the show behind the scenes often bleeding onto the screen.
It doesn’t always involve the full-timers, either; plenty of guest hosts have come in with ideas above their station, whether that’s trying to pitch their own skits or refusing to act out the ones that have been penned for them, and sometimes when those two worlds collide, things can get ugly.
Take the October 6th, 2010, episode, for instance. Hosted by Jane Lynch, it won’t be remembered as one of the greatest episodes in SNL history, if it’s even remembered at all, but one person who’ll never forget it is Bobby Moynihan, because it left him seething to his very bones.
When asked to name the three most overwhelming feelings of his entire life, the actor, writer, and comedian cited the death of his parents, the moment he realised that his own children would have to go through the same thing one day, and “when Jane Lynch had one of my sketches cut on SNL,” underlining just how badly it rattled him by adding, “I still want to kill her to this day.”
Having submitted the sketch multiple times for approval, which revolved around a man hosting a party for reaching his target weight of 600 pounds, it was given the OK by Michaels, and a set was constructed. “They built a big body on a chair, and I had my head poking through it,” Moynihan recalled. “Jane Lynch was my very normal wife, and there were a lot of very normal suburban people at the party.”
“It was just very weird and stupid,” he admitted. “And it was never going to get on again, and it made it to dress, and it got in the show.” By the time the build-up to the live show began, though, Moynihan discovered that his self-created segment had been scrapped and replaced by one called ‘Suze Orman Show’.
It was a bland, nondescript, and altogether pointless fluff piece, which he described as “a political sketch where Jane Lynch was playing Suze Orman that kind of tanked or whatever,” and it was the first time he could ever recall SNL agreeing to position a sketch in the running order, only to reverse course at the last second and replace it with something else, especially when it wasn’t a recurring skit.
Moynihan only found out who was responsible when Lynch “just kind of leaned over and whispered, ‘Sorry, Suze Orman’s a friend of mine,'” leaving him “devastated” that she’d gone behind his back, appealed to the higher-ups, and had one of his creations replaced by a guest host’s idea of ever so gently poking fun at a friend of theirs.
