Mike Schur Says Working at ‘SNL’ Is ‘Kill or Be Killed’

Mike Schur has had a hand in creating some of the century’s most memorable television comedy, including Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine and The Good Place. Working on those shows was a walk in the park compared to his first TV writing job — fighting for air time on Saturday Night Live. 

SNL was one of the first jobs Schur applied for after a college career that included heading the Harvard Lampoon, but he didn’t get the gig right away. During his interview process, “they put us in pairs to walk around and meet the producers,” he told Ted Danson on the Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast. “I was walking around with this woman, and I remember very clearly thinking I’m never getting hired here because this woman is so much funnier than me and so obviously better for this job than I am.”

That woman was Tina Fey. She got the job. Schur didn’t. “I was like, ‘Yes, that is correct. I spent 11 minutes with her, and it was very clear which one of us was ready to work at that show.’”

Schur eventually got in at a time of chaos for the show. He was hired over the holiday break and walked into a mess. “Chris Farley had died a couple of days earlier. People were mourning his death and he had hosted the show like a month earlier,” Schur remembered. “Norm Macdonald had just been fired from Weekend Update. It’s one of the only times I’ve ever known when Lorne (Michaels) was overruled by someone at NBC.” 

But Schur explained it was lucky that he began his SNL tenure during that “very weird moment” in the show’s history. “I sucked at the job and was allowed to suck for a good half a season because no one barely even knew I was there. That’s probably what saved my job.”

Danson, who hosted SNL in 1989, said he’s still amazed by how the show continues to be “the most supercharged example of comedy writing you could possibly endure. It was so high-wire. You started with nothing (on Monday), and by Saturday, you had to be live.” 

He also knows a few people who walked away from Saturday Night Live because the battle to get sketches on the air is so competitive. “The combination of the stress, just the logistics of having to perform every week and whether you’d get your material on the air left them with a little bit of post-traumatic stress,” he said.

It’s a weird show, Schur acknowledged. Other TV comedies — Schur’s sitcoms for example — are team efforts, where individual success equates to everyone’s success. By contrast, “SNL is Darwinian. It’s sink or swim, kill or be killed. When you show up on your first day, no one tells you where the bathrooms are. Nobody tells you how to use the elevators to get down to 8H. It’s a little bit hostile by design.”

“I had a very hard time with it,” Schur confessed. “I think a lot of people do.”