Saturday Night Live Loses Cecily Strong in New Season's Opening Credits

10/02/2022 10:33 am EDT

Saturday Night Live has made some big changes for Season 48 of the long running late night variety series, and one of those changes has seemingly lost Cecily Strong in the process as she is not being shown in the new opening credits! The end of the 47th season saw a few cast members departing following a slate of goodbye sketches, and in the months sense even more so have gone. With some of these signs pointing to Cecily Strong potentially not returning to the series for the new season either, there have been some questions only raided even further thanks to the new opening credits for the season. 

The Season 48 premiere of Saturday Night Live debuted a new opening credits sequence that showed off the new line up of talent coming our way, but Cecily Strong was curiously absent. But as it turns out, Strong is currently headlining The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (a play produced in part by SNL's Lorne Michaels) until October 23rd. Strong is scheduled to return after that for her tenth season, and has yet to note otherwise. So fans need not worry about her potential absence just yet. 

Following the end of the 47th season of Saturday Night Live, Kate McKinnon, Pete Davidson, Aidy Bryant, and Kyle Mooney left the series following a slew of goodbye moments for the each of them during the finale. In the months leading up to the new seasons other cast members such as Melissa Villaseñor, Alex Moffat, Aristotle Athari, and Chris Redd also departed from the show just ahead of the new episodes.

This new season is going to be a testing ground for the new additions to the cast such as Marcello Hernandez, Molly Kearney, Michael Longfellow, and Devon Walker all announced as featured players for the new season. They appear in the new opening credits as well, and have been seen in a few of the sketches (and even the Weekend Update segment) during the premiere. But as for now, Cecily Strong is not being counted as part of the cast until she returns in full. 

Are you missing out on Cecily Strong from Saturday Night Live's Season 48 premiere? Are you hoping to see her pop up before the new season ends its run? What did you think of the premiere? Let us know all of your thoughts about it in the comments! 

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