It was pretty simple. O’Hara, while waiting for “SCTV” to be picked up again in between seasons, signed onto “Saturday Night Live.” When “SCTV” was picked up again, however, O’Hara dropped the “SNL” gig and went back north. She explained it thus:
“Our producer would get a deal with a network, and we’d have a show for a season or two, and then that deal would go away. There’d be a break, then we’d do the show again. […] I got asked to be on ‘Saturday Night Live.’ And of course, I said yes. Who doesn’t want to do that?” [When ‘SCTV’ was picked up again], basically I said, ‘Oh, sorry, I gotta go be with my family.'”
O’Hara left the show before she had a chance to actually be on it. Her loyalty to “SCTV” took precedence over the higher-profile American job. She did feel bad, however, about leaving the “SNL” producers in a lurch. “Yeah,” she said, “not cool to take a job and leave it. You know what I mean?” Luckily, her “SCTV” co-star Robin Duke was able to fill in for her, and everything worked out.
O’Hara has regularly appeared alongside her “SCTV” cast members in feature films and other TV shows ever since. She had multiple scenes with John Candy in the 1990 hit “Home Alone.” Both O’Hara and Martin Short have worked with director Tim Burton, and the two played multiple roles in the 2012 animated film “Frankenweenie.” O’Hara and Levy have each been in several Christopher Guest films, and they had a killer run on the hit TV series “Schitt’s Creek,” which ran from 2015 to 2020.
O’Hara has long been loyal to the cast “SCTV,” and remains so to this day.