Saturday Night Live season 20

Preceding the season 20 premiere, longtime cast members Phil Hartman, Melanie Hutsell, Rob Schneider, and Julia Sweeney all left the show, alongside featured player Sarah Silverman. In their places, the show hired Late Night with David Letterman writer Chris Elliott, as well as stand-up comedians Janeane Garofalo and Laura Kightlinger, to the cast. Elliott and Garofalo were made repertory players, while Kightlinger was made a featured player.

Jay Mohr remained a featured player and Norm Macdonald was promoted to repertory status and made Weekend Update's latest anchor. (Though Kevin Nealon was no longer a Weekend Update anchor, he still remained on the show to the end of the season.)

As the season progressed, Morwenna Banks, Mark McKinney, and Molly Shannon were added to the cast. (McKinney was hired from the then-recently ended sketch show The Kids in the Hall, which was produced by Michaels.)

Several cast members quit the show mid-season. Longtime cast member Mike Myers left after the January 21, 1995 episode (exactly six years after his first episode on January 21, 1989) largely due to his increasing fame as a film star (notably with his role in 1992's Wayne's World). Garofalo quit the show following the February 25 episode, citing her unhappiness with the work environment and writing material. She would later call Saturday Night Live "... an unfair boys' club" and called many of the sketches "juvenile and homophobic." Longtime staff writer and cast member Al Franken's final appearance as a featured player was on May 6 following the box office failure of the SNL spin-off film Stuart Saves His Family.

Following the May 13, 1995 season finale, nine more cast members either quit or were fired from Saturday Night Live, including Banks, Ellen Cleghorne, Elliott, Chris Farley, Kightlinger, Michael McKean, Mohr, Nealon, and Adam Sandler. Nealon, Cleghorne, McKean, Elliott, and Kightlinger all left the show at season's end on their own terms and Farley, Sandler, Banks, and Mohr were let go from the show after the finale.

In his book, Gasping for Airtime, Mohr wrote that following the season, he demanded a promotion to repertory status, among other things; the network procrastinated his wishes throughout the summer of 1995 and he chose to quit the show. Mohr's account of his voluntary departure from SNL has been widely discounted, however. He was under a cloud of suspicion due to his admitted plagiarizing of jokes during the season and his multi-year contract with NBC did not allow him to unilaterally quit.

This was also the final season for director Dave Wilson and bandleader G.E. Smith, who had been with the program since its first and eleventh seasons, respectively.

bold denotes Weekend Update anchor

Notable writers during the 20th season of Saturday Night Live included Jim Downey, Al Franken, Tim Herlihy and Robert Smigel.

Stuart Saves His Family, a film based on the popular Stuart Smalley sketches, was released on April 12, 1995. Cast members Robin Duke, Al Franken and Julia Sweeney appear in the film. The film received modest reviews from critics but was a box office bomb. During the season, Franken performed a Stuart Smalley sketch that parodied the film's poor box office returns. Stuart was depressed and bitter throughout the entire segment, eating cookies and lambasting the audience for choosing other movies (such as Dumb and Dumber and anything Pauly Shore had out at the time) over his.