Everyone worth their laughs in the funny business put on their fanciest clothes on a frigid February night in 2015 and paid tribute to Lorne Michaels during SNL40, the 40th Anniversary Special of Saturday Night Live. Over the course of three-plus primetime hours on NBC, comedy’s best and brightest delivered Lorne Michaels the fondest of farewells after forty years at the helm of America’s late night institution.

Only Lorne didn’t leave. Hasn’t left. Isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

He coulda woulda shoulda, though.

For all of the critical talk week-in and week-out (also year-in and year-out) about the quality of comedy on SNL – it’s a grand tradition dating back to even the original cast years of 1975-1980 – real talk should focus on who’s making the show happen. And that’s always been about Lorne. Even in the years when he wasn’t there, and tried to duplicate his success on NBC in primetime 1984 with The New Show. What happened there? It got old quick. Turned out he was the Not Ready for Primetime Player.

A year later, Lorne was back running SNL.

Three decades later, signs of slippage began to show in the legend of Lorne.

This weekend’s lame Weekend Update apology was only the most recent miscue. Did it look great to have Congressman-elect Dan Crenshaw on the show to rip into Pete Davidson a week after Davidson’s mocked Crenshaw’s eye patch (which covers the eye he lost during an IED explosion in Afghanistan)? Yes. Yes it did. But you didn’t need to have Davidson actually apologize for his goof, because we all already know Davidson himself is a goof. And having Crenshaw then lecture the audience about Veterans Day wasn’t exactly LOL material, either.

But Lorne Michaels has allowed himself and SNL to go from the show of the counterculture in 1975 to the show of the culture in 2018. No wonder so many viewers remain nostalgic for the “original” cast. Of course, Lorne raided The National Lampoon for much of the on-air and writing talent that would cement his own legacy (watch A Futile and Stupid Gesture to see the other side of this story).

Certainly, you can point to any number of amazingly funny comedians who either A) never got cast on SNL or B) got cast but didn’t truly blossom until after their stints on SNL (think Chris Rock, Ben Stiller, Sarah Silverman, etc.). But for every comedian you name, Lorne loyalists could say he spotted their talent before the rest of us did. His comedy king- and queen-making prowess remained unrivaled.

Perhaps Lorne’s instincts took a turn for the worse in 2013. That’s the year he encouraged John Mulaney —not only a top writer but the top prospect to take over Weekend Update— to leave the show, despite announcing that head writer and Update anchor Seth Meyers would be leaving to take over Late Night. NBC passed on the Lorne-produced Mulaney, which seemed dumb at the time, until we all saw the finished product on FOX the following fall. Making matters worse, Lorne took away Cecily Strong’s ability to shine as Update characters by “promoting” her to co-anchor Update.

Update has yet to regain its critical cachet since then, despite the vote of confidence NBC Colin Jost and Michael Che when they announced the duo as co-hosts of the 2018 Emmys. (It’s no secret that Lorne made that happen.) Since 2014, Lorne has held executive producer control over all of NBC’s late-night programming and extended his influence into multiple specials and series on other networks, too.

Having that much say over the business of TV may have affected his creative quality control.

As Taran Killam, SNL alum and star of ABC’s new hit sitcom Single Parents, revealed in a recent podcast interview, the mood and morale among cast and writers shifted once Meyers moved, even though he was just down the hallway. Meyers, Killam says, “was the last person [at SNL] who I witnessed really collaborate with Lorne, as opposed to just kind of do what Lorne says.”

The show began pulling punches. In December 2014, when residents of Ferguson, Mo., rioted after a cop killed an unarmed black man in the street, they had a great sketch to comment on it. But didn’t air it. Instead, that Saturday’s show didn’t mention Ferguson at all, choosing instead to open with a sketch about the Eric Garner verdict in New York City, which sure, sounds as politically prickly, until you realize that the sketch had nothing to say.

It was at this point that we started seeing more than a few “Cut For Time” sketches show up on the SNL YouTube channel, most of them funnier than what aired on TV.

At what point do you begin to question the producers?

Is it when Lorne not only insists on the cast taking it easy on Donald Trump to keep him “likable,” but also letting Trump host an episode in November 2015, when doing so gave him a huge profile to stand out among the many Republican presidential candidates at the time?

Is it when he announces six months later that SNL will begin producing sponsored sketches for companies because “This will give time back to the show and make it easier to watch the show live”?

Is it when he stretches his SNL writing staff so thin that they have nothing funny to give to Maya and Marty during the entire summer of 2016?

Is it when he opens the show after the 2016 election with Kate McKinnon as Hillary Clinton on the piano performing “Hallelujah,” wherein the show becomes the very thing we mocked about Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip?!

Is it when he lets Sasheer Zamata leave, giving more time for Leslie Jones to learn how to read cue cards while acting on live television?

These aren’t knocks on Jones or McKinnon or Strong or Che or even Jost, because the cast has a wealth of undeniable talent. It’s just that Lorne doesn’t seem to know how to utilize their strengths any longer, and he’s more and more relying on his celebrity friends and connections to carry the load. We didn’t think much of it when Tina Fey stepped in to play Sarah Palin in 2008, because her portrayal so devastatingly satirized the real political joke of that election. But what worked with the surprise of Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer, or the of-course-ness of Larry David as Bernie Sanders, quickly devolved into the Too Many Cooks Celebrity Cameo Cold Open game of telephone this May with Alec Baldwin, Jimmy Fallon, Scarlett Johansson, Martin Short, Ben Stiller, and Stormy Daniels all making us wonder if the actual cast is even talented at all.

As Decider’s own Meghan O’Keefe implored last year, where did the recurring characters go?

They all went to stunt casting, that’s where.

We saw two weekends how well McKinnon and Strong can nail impersonations we hadn’t much seen before in this FOX News cold open.

But the focus on celebs and politics is muscling out the great new hires, as well as recurring characters, and even the legendary fake ads now have to be about something in the news, instead of weirdo creative flourishes like Colon Blow or Happy Fun Ball that could run any Saturday and still generate laughs.

Melissa Villasenor has so many impersonations, and yet whenever we see her in a sketch, it’s just a regular character. Chris Redd has won one Emmy for co-writing a rap video for SNL, and his new “Trees” video might just trap another award, if Lorne and NBC hadn’t bungled the airing of it on live TV.

The SNL of the Trump era seems to generate more claps than laughs, which is death to comedy. The ratings might be gangbusters, but the comedy is bereft of gutbusters.

Whenever Lorne does decide to leave, who’ll take the reins? An outsider seems an unlikely choice, not without blowing up the show’s structure entirely. Perhaps you could film most of the sketches in advance, and leave the cold open, monologue, Update and musical guests for live performances.

The most likely successor for years? Steve Higgins, who first made a name for himself as part of The Higgins Boys and Gruber, but has written and produced alongside Lorne since 1995, and seen onscreen for almost a decade as Jimmy Fallon’s sidekick, egging on Fallon’s more sophomoric instincts. To which I say: Ew!!! Difficult to imagine SNL would be any different with Higgins in charge.

Lindsay Shookus? She’s the producer most connected to the current cast, but also at times too connected to the talent? (See: Ben Affleck)

Michael Shoemaker? Shoe is the most reliably funny producer inside 30 Rock, who left the show back in 2008 to give Jimmy Fallon a boost at Late Night and is currently shepherding Seth Meyers as the EP Late Night. Would he even want to go back to SNL, or is he having enough fun where he’s at? Time for a closer look.

Marci Klein? Same question goes for Klein, who left SNL a while back and EP’d 30 Rock. Which, obviously, leads us to wonder about…

Tina Fey? Fey ran an SNL in her dreams on 30 Rock, and has shown up enough since leaving to make the 5 Timer Club of guest hosts, including this past weekend. Fey also just signed on to EP the new Busy Tonight, the late-nighter on E!

Perhaps, though, it’s time for a Millennial to take it over. Lorne was 29 when SNL debuted, after all. Here’s my two cents on two young guns with senses of humor to take the show to a different place. Bring Mulaney back, because he’d absolutely love running a variety show. On the other hand, that might take him too far away from his current perch as one of the top live stand-up comedians of his generation. So if you do give the show to Mulaney, give him the monologue slot permanently because the guest hosts usually waste that time anyhow. Or if you don’t go with Mulaney, how about Simon Rich? At 34, he has one of the most imaginative comedic voices, whether on the page or on the screen (Man Seeking Woman).

I know. So many white people.

If only SNL cultivated other voices from other cultures so the show could grow in a new direction. But that’s Lorne’s fault, too.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.