The golden anniversary celebration for Saturday Evening Reside introduced in rankings gold as properly.
Sunday’s dwell SNL50: The Anniversary Particular drew 14.8 million viewers on NBC and Peacock, primarily based on Nielsen figures and inner numbers from NBCUniversal. The present is NBC’s largest primetime leisure telecast in 5 years, since 18.33 million individuals watched the 2020 Golden Globes.
The viewers can be the second-largest for any non-sports primetime community present thus far within the 2024-25 season, behind solely the 15.4 million viewers for the Grammy Awards on CBS earlier in February. Sunday’s present greater than tripled the same-day season common for normal episodes of SNL, which draw about 4.9 million viewers.
In the important thing ad-sales demographic of adults 18-49, SNL50 scored a 2.53 ranking throughout NBC and Peacock, equal to about 3.39 million individuals in that age vary. That’s additionally a five-year excessive for the community in primetime, excluding sports activities.
A purple carpet particular previous to the principle present averaged 6.5 million viewers on NBC, E! and Peacock.
Sunday’s present featured reprisals of favourite sketches by present and former SNL castmembers, a heartfelt musical quantity from Adam Sandler and performances by Paul Simon and Sabrina Carpenter, Miley Cyrus and Brittany Howard, Lil Wayne with The Roots and Paul McCartney.
A decade in the past, SNL’s fortieth anniversary particular drew 23.1 million viewers on NBC alone — albeit at a time when linear TV was nonetheless the dominant mode of viewing and tens of hundreds of thousands extra U.S. houses had cable or satellite tv for pc subscriptions. The fortieth anniversary present got here inside 1.7 million viewers of that yr’s Grammys (24.82 million); this yr, the margin between the Grammys and SNL50 was about 600,000 viewrs.