“Saturday Night Live” returned last night for its 46th year and scored a whopping 7.77 million total viewers.
How big is that? It’s up 89% from last year’s premiere with Woody Harrelson, which had 4.1 million viewers. That’s the average for last season, 4 million fans per show, with the exception of Eddie Murphy’s now Emmy winning hosting night. That was an event, and the result was 163 million viewers in a show that also featured Lizzo.
This year’s Lizzo, Megan Thee Stallion, was the musical guest last night with Chris Rock as host. They were each excellent, and Megan was on point politically. Her production was top notch.
It wasn’t a great show, though. The cold open was too long. Jim Carrey has to find his Joe Biden; I prefer Jason Sudeikis. The first couple of sketches were lame, especially the “Edith Puthee” one. It was infantile. The nicest moment of the 90 minutes was Kate McKinnon’s farewell to RBG.
What accounted for the huge ratings? Several things. Pent up demand for a laugh. The curiosity of how the show would handle the political chaos of the last week. The guest stars, of course, who are incredibly popular.
A special nod to Chloe Fineman’s parody of the “Drew Barrymore Show.” She calls Drew her “queen” on Twitter, but the sketch was a little more biting than that. Drew and her show are insufferable. Fineman has found that already. Barrymore is so loaded on being upbeat that she’s already Tweeting how much she loves it. I don’t want to be there when she crashes.
