‘Saturday Night Live’ Hits Season-High Viewership With Sam Rockwell Episode – Update

UPDATED, 10:40 AM: NBC said today that its Sam Rockwell-hosted episode of Saturday Night Live this past weekend hit a season high in total viewers. An average of 7.23 million people tuned in, many of them probably interested to see what the Studio 8H team would do with the sh*thole story.

The previous viewership high was set by the Season 43 premiere on September, hosted by Ryan Gosling with Jay-Z supplying the music.

Also featuring musical guest Halsey, Saturday’s episode drew a 1.9/9 in the 18-49 demo. NBC also noted that the current season is the show’s second-most-watched in L+7 in nine years.

PREVIOUSLY, January 14: After a monthlong holiday hiatus Saturday Night Live returned to originals last night. The show, hosted by Sam Rockwell with musical guest Halsey and featuring SNL alums Bill Murray as Steve Bannon and Fred Armisen as Michael Wolff, drew a 4.6 household Live+Same Day rating in the metered markets and a 1.9 in adults 18-49 in the markets with local people meters.

In households, SNL matched its last original on Dec. 16 hosted by Kevin Hart. In 18-49, last’s night’s show was down a tenth from its most recent outing.

Last night’s Saturday Night Live was the #1 non-sports telecast of the night on the Big 4 networks in both metered-market households and 18-49 in the local people meters, ahead of all primetime entertainment programming on the broadcast networks and trailing only CBS’ NFL Playoff coverage.

Erik Pedersen contributed to this report.

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