Saturday Night Live just dropped the promo for this weekend's new episode which will be hosted by comedian Shane Gillis. This hosting gig represents a long road to redemption for Gillis, and it will undoubtedly stir up memories of the SNL casting controversy he was at the center of back in 2019.

On September 12th of that year, SNL announced three new cast members it was hiring for its 45th season — featured players Bowen Yang, Chloe Fineman and Shane Gillis. Yang quickly became a star and also made history for being SNL's first Chinese-American cast member. Fineman has also become a fan-favorite on the show for her spot-on celebrity impressions.

For Gillis, his time at SNL was quite a bit shorter and far less sweet. As a New Yorker profile recalls, within hours after Gillis' hiring, an independent journalist Seth Simons found and brought to light a podcast clip from 2018 in which Gillis and the podcast's co-host, Matt McCusker, were talking about Philadelphia's Chinatown and made a series of derogatory racial slurs against Asians.

In part of the clip, Gillis speaks “out of the side of his mouth, seemingly impersonating a disdainful white politician from an earlier era” as he says some of the controversial remarks. If it was intended to be a comedic bit by Gillis, it was certainly a failed one and the public exhibited no appetite by that time for a comedian who used racial slurs — even mockingly and/or in a manner not meant to be taken seriously as the speaker's own views.

Gillis issued a less-than-enthused apology, calling himself “a comedian who pushes boundaries,” and stating, “I’m happy to apologize to anyone who’s actually offended by anything I said.”

It was therefore not much of a surprise when, only four days after his hiring, Lorne Michaels released a statement explaining that Gillis “will not be joining SNL.” Michaels also noted that Gillis' podcast comments were “offensive, hurtful, and unacceptable.”

Gillis still showed little remorse even after the firing and tweeted that he was “always a Mad TV guy anyway” in response to being let go.

He has spent the almost five years since rebuilding his career, and gaining a substantial following as a comedian. He's far from the only provocative stand up to court controversy, as Dave Chappelle has done with many of his recent stand up specials as well.

But to appear on the very program at the heart of his controversial hiring and then firing as a host less than five years after the incident will undoubtedly be an interesting experiment, to say the least. Sometimes SNL‘s controversial hosts lead to high ratings for the show, so we'll soon see where Shane Gillis stacks up.