It’s a truth universally acknowledged that between the sky-high ratings and the pile of Emmys, Saturday Night Live enjoyed a killer season last year. This season, however, has been a little bumpier—thanks to either Donald Trump fatigue or shifts in both the writers’ room and cast lineup. Perhaps as an answer to that, Lorne Michaels has promoted S.N.L. “Weekend Update” hosts Colin Jost and Michael Che to the position of co-head writers, alongside current head writers Kent Sublette and Bryan Tucker. Confusingly, this choice feels like one that will move the show even further away from what made it successful last season. And even more bafflingly, this will be the second time in less than five years that Jost has been promoted to head writer.

From the outside looking in, it’s impossible to know the true reasons behind staffing changes—but here are some facts. Before last season, S.N.L. was in a serious ratings slide after the exit of head writer Seth Meyers and a number of familiar cast members. Meyers’s heir apparent and replacement, Colin Jost, quietly stepped down as head writer in 2015, allegedly to focus on “Weekend Update.”

In the summer of 2016, just as Michaels was reaching out to Alec Baldwin to see if he wanted to play Trump for a series of pre-election debate sketches, S.N.L. promoted Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider to join Bryan Tucker as head writers. Under Kelly, Schneider, and Tucker, the show enjoyed unprecedented success during the 2016-2017 season, with Kent Sublette joining the head-writer team halfway through the year. (Sublette’s promotion came just one week before he suggested that Melissa McCarthy impersonate Sean Spicer, a casting choice that became one of the year’s most viral sensations.) Though it was Sublette and Michaels who each had the brilliant idea to outsource political impressions last year, the 2016-2017 season bore the unmistakable mark of Kelly and Schneider’s sharp, progressive, female-fronted millennial humor.

This past summer, Kelly and Schneider abruptly and quietly left S.N.L. after only one season—ostensibly to pursue their own Comedy Central series. It was odd to see the pair responsible for at least some of last year’s success leave so quickly—and their absence has been felt this season. Currently, S.N.L. feels sluggish on some of the culture’s hottest topics; that lack of relevancy may be why ratings are starting to cool somewhat, from an average of 11 million viewers and a 3.51 rating for adults 18–49 for first-run episodes last year to a 2.9 rating for adults 18-49 and 9.6 million viewers per episode this year. (Of course, 2016 was also an election year, which always gives S.N.L. a boost, regardless of who’s in the writers’ room.)

A re-promoted Jost and freshly promoted Che are a particularly unexpected choice to replace the female-friendly Schneider and Kelly. Their “Weekend Update”’s record on female-fronted, progressive comedy is patchy at best. Then again, Che also co-wrote one of the best sketches of 2016, featuring Tom Hanks and an incisive look at the common ground between black voters and Trump voters. He also tackled his persistent unpopularity with liberal white women head-on in last week’s episode, with a sketch called “Gretchen” that was much funnier and far less confrontational than one might have expected.

Jost and Che also have a feather in their cap thanks to the ratings success of their experimental summer run of Thursday night installments of “Weekend Update.” Buoyed by guest stars, but nonetheless fronted by Jost and Che, those episodes held steady in the ratings despite being divorced from the late-night comedy institution.

Nonetheless, replacing Kelly and Schneider with Jost and Che still seems like a further pivot away from the writing that made last season feel so fresh. To distance oneself from a highly acclaimed, award-winning tone is a baffling choice—but hey, Lorne Michaels has proven us all wrong before.