Don’t forget: Bowen Yang is still Emmy-eligible.
On Monday, “Saturday Night Live,” the long-running NBC late-night sketch series, held its Emmy For Your Consideration event in Los Angeles at the Television Academy’s Wolf Theatre at the Saban Media Center. Yang was among the 12-member cast panel, which also included Tommy Brennan, Andrew Dismukes, Chloe Fineman, Marcello Hernández, James Austin Johnson, Ben Marshall, Ashley Padilla, Kam Patterson, Sarah Sherman, Veronika Slowikowska and Kenan Thompson.
“Yes, everyone, I’m FYC-eligible!” Yang reminded the crowd during the Variety moderated this conversation in partnership with NBCUniversal.
Several cast members have left the show mid-year during the show’s 51-season run, and Yang now joins that group, each exit accompanied by its own host and musical guest. Among them: Dana Carvey (host Luke Perry and musician Mick Jagger), Norm Macdonald (host Julianne Moore and the Backstreet Boys), Amy Poehler (host Hugh Laurie and Kanye West) and Cecily Strong (host Austin Butler and Lizzo). On Yang’s departure episode, he had host Ariana Grande and musical guest Cher.
“It was so crazy, because those are two comedians, I feel like we can all agree,” Yang says. “Cher’s a literal sketch comedian. Ariana went through the whole Nickelodeon developmental thing. I can’t believe that was the fortuitous thing.”
When Yang earned his fourth acting nomination for “SNL” in 2025, he became the most nominated Asian male performer in Emmy history. He was hired as an “SNL” staff writer in 2018 and in 2021 he was the first “SNL” featured player to land an Emmy nomination in an acting category.
He isn’t the only one who has left a mark on Lorne Michaels’ program.
Thompson, who won an Emmy in 2018 for co-writing the “SNL” song “Come Back, Barack,” is the show’s longest-tenured cast member, with 23 years under his belt, a run he calls “surreal.”
“We have a front-row seat to some of the greatest comedic minds in the world,” he told the crowd. “The show recreates itself every single week, and you have no choice but to go along with it. The rotating influx of talent, both writers and cast, allows for new ideas, friendships and collabs to form, and that keeps it pushing through time. I’m a witness to how the machine works. It’s not rocket science. They just hire whoever’s the greatest and most available.”
One of Hernández’s newest characters is Mr. Fronzi, a male teacher based on one of his real-life female teachers. “I guess it’s up to the person that you’re making fun of to decide if it’s bad or not,” he said with a chuckle. “I tried to make it a man and do it a little different, so she wouldn’t feel bad. I told her I was doing it, and she called me: ‘Marcello, don’t forget the limp.’”
Padilla, the San Francisco Bay Area native who honed her skills with the Groundlings Main Stage company, was a standout this season with the viral “Mom Confession” sketch. In it, she played a mother preparing for a birthday dinner with her husband (guest host and “Pillion” star Alexander Skarsgård) and their four children (Brennan, Dismukes, Sherman and Wickline). She describes her process like a true performer: “I mainly focus on what’s funny for me and what’s making me laugh, and the rest is not up to me.”
Sherman, who just completed her fifth season on “Saturday Night Live,” is known for her Weekend Update segments antagonizing Colin Jost. Her ultimate goal is to “find out where he sleeps” and “do something crazy to him.”
The panel also played a game of superlatives and prompts that turned into the cast roasting one another, and the members who weren’t there. Missing from the event were Michael Che, Jost, Mikey Day, Jeremy Culhane and Jane Wickline.
Hernández went after the absent Day, calling him “an agent of chaos. He’s been there for a long time, and he doesn’t care, and he’ll get in your face in a way that’s wrong, and he’ll ignore the cards, and he’ll just say whatever.”
Johnson joked of freshman cast member Culhane, “I think there’s a screw loose.”
The ensemble isn’t the only thing in play for Emmy attention. The series is also competing for a slot in the outstanding variety series category, which merged earlier this year. Under the Emmy rules, one of the spots is guaranteed for a scripted variety program, the classification with the fewest submissions. The only entries classified as scripted variety this year are “Saturday Night Live,” “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver,” “It’s Florida, Man” and BYUtv’s “Studio C,” which returns to the submission deck this year.
Across every iteration of the variety and sketch category, the long-running comedy created by Lorne Michaels has not missed a programming nomination since 2007. The new category looks strange when these programs are judged side by side.
As the panel wrapped, marking the last “SNL” Emmy FYC event Yang will take part in as a cast member, he paid homage to the ensemble and crew at 30 Rock.
“I am in awe, and I go, ‘Holy shit, these people are doing this with no safety net,’” Yang said before getting emotional. “They are doing something incredibly difficult on a weekly basis, with a cadence where they get to show all of you, and me now, how much they improve at the skill. I really hope everyone considers that it is very hard to do this, especially now, when [comedy] is in very short supply. Thank you all for coming to my TED Talk!”
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