'Saturday Night Live' women are mad about 'Weekend Update' going all-male

The latest shakeup on the Weekend Update desk is creating bad blood on the set of “Saturday Night Live.”

 

Confidenti@l is told female cast members are fuming that when Cecily Strong got the boot from the segment, she was replaced by a man — meaning there are no women on the show’s flagship sketch.

A spy overheard recent recruit Sasheer Zamata telling a pal she and some of the other players are outraged that the show’s longest-running segment is now all-male.

“She was saying that it’s bull---- that in 2014 there would be two males and no women in such a prominent position on the show,” said our eavesdropper. “She said that there should be at least one man and one woman or, if anything, two women.”

“She was incredulous about it,” the source said of Zamata, who joined the show in January. “It’s obviously something that she feels very passionately about. She said they think it’s unfair.”

Strong took her seat next to long-running Weekend Update host Seth Meyers in September 2013, and she stayed put when Meyers left for “Late Night” and was replaced by Colin Jost. She was dropped from the role over the summer break, and Michael Che took her place when the season began last month.

Over the years, “SNL” has fluctuated between having one host and two in the famous newscast parody, but when there have been two hosts, at least one of them had always been female — until the Che/Jost pairing. In 2004, Amy Poehler and Tina Fey became the first all-female lineup, keeping their posts until 2006.

It’s not the first time the iconic NBC show has wrestled with gender politics. Veteran cast member Kenan Thompson told TV Guide last October that he had refused to dress in drag until executive producer Lorne Michaels hired a black woman to play the female roles he usually took on. Zamata joined shortly after that.

Janeane Garofalo quit midseason in 1995 — partly, New York Magazine reported, because she had been pigeonholed into “dull, secondary wife and girlfriend roles.” She said that as a rookie on the show she experienced something like a “frat house hazing.” Original cast member Jane Curtin , for her part, once accused “SNL” legend John Belushi of sabotaging female writers’ work.