Michael Che’s Netflix special, Michael Che: Shot in Minnesota, debuted on the Top 10 list this weekend. The comedian’s pretty proud of the fact, though he feels like he may have set himself up for some uncomfortable moments by taking press in the days leading up to its release. In fact, in a new post, he said he believes the grassroots initiative was the thing that brought eyeballs to his new special… and not the brouhaha surrounding what happened with a recent SNL guest host on the air.
How Che Got Embroiled In Shane Gillis Monologue Drama
To be clear, Michael Che has told some hairy jokes on SNL before, particularly whilst doing joke swap with Colin Jost. Regardless, he was not the subject of attention during the NBC sketch comedy series’ October 10th episode. Instead, it was host Shane Gillis who shocked audiences, the Internet and even some people previously involved in the show with commentary about women’s gym clothing during his monologue. His use of the word “whores” to describe women getting their workout on garnered more headlines than his f-bomb.
Che was seemingly a little mad this whole thing went down because it happened right before his SNL special dropped. He’d (likely) already committed to press for the special, and knew deep down that people would want to talk about Shane Gillis. Indeed, there was a very uncomfortable exchange when he appeared on NBC’s Today.
Now, in a new post on his Instagram, he seems to be implying he should have skipped the press and let word of mouth do its thing.
Now, by the time of this writing Monday morning, Che’s special had fallen out of the Top 10. Intriguingly, other special Mojo Brookzz I Know You Lying has been going strong in the Top 10 since it landed on the Netflix release schedule on October 6th. Netflix has a tendency to do really with comedy specials and has developed a loyal fanbase when it comes to that type of content on the streamer, so I would have liked to have seen Che’s special stick it out on the list a little longer, and maybe it could have used a bit more word of mouth.
I’ll also just mention, I only heard about his special because Che started commenting on how Gillis’ joke would impact his press for Shot in Minnesota. It hit the 2026 TV schedule on October 13th -- three days after Gillis' SNL episodes, and Netflix started recommending the special to me over the weekend after I started researching the topic. So, there’s certainly different ways to get the word out there.
