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Kristen Wiig is one of the brightest stars to ever emerge from Saturday Night Live. She's uniquely versatile, unfailingly funny, and has been a dominant force in the comedy landscape for nearly a decade now. She also has broken incredible ground for women in comedy. The success of her 2011 film, Bridesmaids, blew through Hollywood's comedy glass ceiling and paved a path for comediennes like Melissa McCarthy to become superstars in their own right.
That said, Wiig's legacy at Saturday Night Live might be a little more complicated than it appears. Wiig's gargantuan talent might have inadvertently pushed other performers down and made it nigh on impossible for Saturday Night Live to foster new female talent in the years she was there.
Saturday Night Live has always been a strange place for women in comedy. On one hand, the very first person cast for the show was the luminous Gilda Radner. Along with Jane Curtin and Larraine Newman, Radner helped establish a space for women on Saturday Night Live where they were on equal ground as their male counterparts. And considering they were working alongside such legends as Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, and Bill Murray, that was no small feat. Over the years, though, women have also encountered some serious resistance on the show; Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Janeane Garofalo are just two of the female performers who had infamously difficult times at the show. When Tina Fey became the show's first female head writer, she made it a point to work with the other women on the show in a supportive and collaborative manner, and since her tenure, it seems obvious that women do best on Saturday Night Live when they champion each other.
When Wiig joined the cast of Saturday Night Live in 2005, Tina Fey was still the head writer. Fey, along with Amy Poehler, Rachel Dratch, and Maya Rudolph, had worked to usher in a Golden Era for female performers on the variety show. Those four women were fond of working together in pairs and teams and making each other look great. Their comedy was often based on satire, interpersonal relationships, and shrewd social commentary.
As Dratch, Rudolph, Fey, and Poehler all left the show, Wiig became the most visible female cast member. In an interesting twist, though, at times it felt like she was the only female on the show. During this era, Lorne Michaels hired a slew of talented female comics—including Casey Wilson, Michaela Watkins, Nasim Pedrad, and Jenny Slate—but none of them ever seemed to totally gel with the cast. Or, more specifically, none of them gelled with Wiig.
Kristen Wiig liked to do character-based sketches on SNL wherein she would play someone with an outlandish character quirk — constant one-upmanship, an obsession with Target, a violent inability to keep a secret, having tiny hands, etc. — who would bulldoze through the scene and make almost every other character feel uncomfortable. These characters are usually either obsessed with being center stage or just naturally take the spotlight away from everyone else. It's a very specific style of comedy that's unabashedly Wiig, and that doesn't require a huge amount of collaborative effort from the other players. Everyone else is there to play it more or less straight so that Wiig's wackiness seems even more pronounced.
Now, it's not Wiig's responsibility as an artist to also be a mentor. It was never on her to pull Casey Wilson or Abby Elliott aside and say, "Hey, let's write a sketch together." However, it is fascinating to me that when she did collaborate on the show, it was often with the male performers like Fred Armisen ("Garth and Kat"), Jason Sudeikis ("Two A-Holes"), and Bill Hader.
It's also noteworthy that she hasn't really worked with either Fey or Poehler since they left Studio 8H. She's got a cameo in Date Night, but that's kind of it. She never guest-starred on 30 Rock or Parks and Recreation, and the only female SNL alumni in Bridesmaids are Rudolph (who was a Groundling with Wiig) and two women from earlier eras: Nancy Walls and Melanie Hutsell. Then again, perhaps there's nothing gendered about Wiig's choices. Maybe it all just comes down to who her friends are, and if so, it appears (to an outsider) that she was better at making friends with women from the Groundlings and the dudes on the show than she ever was with her female SNL castmates.
Since Wiig left Saturday Night Live, a new generation of female comedians has flourished on the show. Vanessa Bayer, Kate McKinnon, Cecily Strong, Aidy Bryant, Leslie Jones, and Sasheer Zamata routinely steal the show and spark the cultural conversation (arguably more so than any of their male castmember contemporaries), but you have to wonder if they would have thrived as well in Wiig's shadow. As much as Kristen Wiig represents how well women can do in comedy, her own towering talents (and very singular style of sketch comedy) left little room for her female contemporaries to shine.
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