I work in production in NYC. 18hr days aren’t unheard of, unfortunately. When it’s coupled with the rest of the grueling schedule, it can literally kill you. The unions have been trying to get our schedules made more logical for a long time. But the entire industry is built around this type of schedule. Gear gets rented by the day, so that entire business is modeled around that insane schedule, the spaces they rent to shoot are done by the day so getting a job done in one day is how that entire business is modeled…and we are contracted for the day and can only accept the one job/day, so our entire careers are built around this structure.

SNL, however, is a notoriously terrible job to work on. It’s known for being a massive headache, where you will work extra long hours deep into the night because they don’t start until too late in the day and because shit is getting planned and added on the fly. And they have a grueling level of quality, where you’re expected to get done in one day what would normally take days. And then you all gotta stay around to break it all right back down and get all that stuff returned to wherever they rented it from.

We can handle long days when we start early, that’s normal for us. But when they start pushing us back it really gets to be difficult. Because a lot of us get booked on a different job the next day, so you’re just losing your turnaround time for the following job. This life definitely isn’t for everyone.