Why Cecily Strong Kept Her Departure From Saturday Night Live Under Wraps

When eight cast members left "Saturday Night Live" after season 47, fans could at least take solace in the fact that Cecily Strong was still sticking around. Strong may not have made headlines as often as Kate McKinnon or the chaotic Pete Davidson, but she has always been one of the most prominent, most versatile, and most consistently funny cast members across her 11 seasons on the show. She's played a million different characters on Weekend Update, she's had a star role in basically every musical sketch, and she has a well-known knack for performing passive-aggressive voiceovers in parody commercials. In the few episodes where she's absent, like the opening weeks of season 48 where she was busy performing in a play in Los Angeles, her presence is always missed.

Still, 11 seasons is a long time to stick around on any one show, so it wasn't too surprising when Strong announced she's finally stepping away on December 17, 2022. "I'm sorry I've been a little quiet about it publicly," Strong wrote in an Instagram post after her final episode, explaining the apparent suddenness of her departure. "I didn't want the extra pressure on something already so emotional for me."

She also wrote about how grateful she was to have gotten an extra half-season on the show. Her familiar presence not only helped audience members ease into a new era, but they also helped give Strong more time to make peace with her departure. "I'm so grateful I got to have these wonderful past six shows to help me ease into it," she added, "and get to meet and laugh and probably overly hug [new cast members] Molly, Marcello, Devon, and Michael who I think are not only brilliantly funny but really great humans."

There were two main sketches in Cecily Strong's final episode dedicated to saying farewell to her. One was a Weekend Update segment where she played her long-time recurring character Cathy Anne. Here, the lovably incoherent Cathy Anne says goodbye to Michael Che and Colin Jost, under the pretext that Cathy's going to prison for all those crimes she's mentioned over the years. Cathy Anne brings up how she used to be a co-anchor on Weekend Update with Jost in his first season; it's a joke that's funny in how it implies that Cathy was once a successful woman who fell hard off the wagon, but also just a sweet little callback to how far her and Jost's relationship goes. Before Jost had Che to bounce off of, he had Strong to help ease the pressure of having to measure up to his predecessor, Seth Meyers.

The other big sketch started off with Kenan Thompson saying his goodbyes to Strong. Then Kenan had the host Austin Butler come on to sing her Elvis Presley's "Blue Christmas," and soon most of the show's cast had come on-stage to sing along with them. It's a lovely goodbye sketch, reminiscent of Kristen Wiig's farewell in 2012. It's a sketch that makes it abundantly clear how much everyone's going to miss her, and how much she's going to miss them. As Strong said about the show in her Instagram post:

"I am ready to go, but I'll always know home is here. I've had the time of my life working with the greatest people on earth."

"Saturday Night Live" airs Saturday evenings on NBC.