Behind-the-scenes changes at Saturday Night Live never garner as much press as the more obvious hiring and firing of cast members. (Case in point, it took several weeks before anyone noticed that Colin Jost had quietly stepped down as head writer last year.) But the changes you don’t see often have much more impact on the long-running comedy institution than the ones you do. In addition to firing Jay Pharoah, Taran Killam, and Jon Rudnitsky, S.N.L. is welcoming two new head writers to the team that could lead to a rebound in the ratings and a dramatic change in tone to better fit with younger, modern audiences.

Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider will be added as head writers while the current team of Rob Klein and Bryan Tucker are also expected to return. Along with Kelly, Schneider—*S.N.L.’*s first female head writer since Paula Pell stepped down in 2008 —has been responsible for a number of the show’s most popular and viral sketches including “The Beygency,” “Back Home Ballers,” the Emmy-nominated “(Do It on My) Twin Bed,” “Bern Your Enthusiasm,” and “Bar Talk” with Hillary Clinton. Kelly and Schneider were hired, as they put it to Splitsider, when TV “really started hiring kids off the internet and web video people.” Their backgrounds at places like CollegeHumor and The Onion paid off in spades for S.N.L. which increasingly has to program with next-day internet viewers in mind.

But Kelly and Schneider also present an opportunity for S.N.L. to further eradicate an out-of-date bro tone in its comedy. When departing cast member Rudnitsky was hired last season, his pre-S.N.L. comedy—largely consisting of questionable gay and racial humor—set off some alarms. As it turned out, Rudnitsky’s most distinguishing contribution to last season was a lisping, mincing imitation of Anderson Cooper that resulted in significant backlash from even Cooper himself.

But Rudnitsky is far from the only cast member to draw criticism for his portrayal of gay characters. In 2008, then head writer Seth Meyers had to give an interview to The Advocate defending a gay-joke-packed episode that Gawker dubbed “A Gay Minstrel Show.” At the time Meyers said, “We have gay writers here, and I can sort of speak for everyone who works here that this is a place that feels strongly on the right side of that issue.” But in 2013, a Salon headline read: Saturday Night Live can’t seem to stop mocking gay men and departing veteran cast member Taran Killam was often singled-out as the most egregious perpetrator of gay stereotypes.

While it may be a coincidence that Rudnitsky and Killam were both shown the door this year, there seems little danger of gay caricatures continuing during the Kelly/Schneider era. Kelly, an out gay man, gave a recent interview to The Gay Times about the well-rounded gay characters in his Sundance film Other People: