‘SNL’ Creator Lorne Michael Says Significant Changes Are Coming Ahead of Satire Show’s 51st Season

Saturday Night Live creator and head honcho Lorne Michaels is “gutting” the cast of the iconic satire show — which has been a launching pad for superstars including Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray, Tina Fey, Will Ferrell and Chris Rock — in a seemingly desperate move to save it amid buzz that all late-night shows are on the chopping block.

During an interview with Puck, the 80-year-old Michaels, who’s run the skit show all but five years of its five decades, gave a gloomy warning of a “significant shake-up” where “several current cast members [of the current 17] are expected to exit” before season 51 premieres on Oct. 4. (Heidi Gardner, Michael Longfellow and Devon Walker are just a few names who are exiting.)

The cast-gutting comes with a sense of desperation as the veteran producer admits he feels “pressure to reinvent this season” as late-night shows on NBC and other networks face doomsday.

As Globe previously noted, CBS has axed Stephen Colbert’s late talk show as of next May — some say to speed up an $8 billion merger for the network’s parent company through the Federal Communications Commission.

Currently, NBC shells out $4 million per episode or about $100 million yearly for SNL, which pulls in an average of 8 million viewers per show.

But sources also dish that SNL and NBC’s weekday late shows — hosted by Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers — lose a whopping combined $100 million a year. And ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live reportedly “doesn’t cover its costs from regular TV advertising.”

Media expert Robert Thompson, head of Syracuse University’s Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture, believes SNL will continue as long as Michaels, who launched it in 1975, can run it, but at age 80 that probably won’t be too long.

‘If [Michaels] decides to retire, or can’t do those shows anymore, NBC would be [in] an interesting position … the opportunity to get out of late night in one fell swoop instead of overhauling every program,” says Thompson, per Daily Mail.

“It would be the easiest time to say we had a good run.”