Saturday Night Live, SNL, has recently experienced a remarkable surge in popularity. The show officially sparked in 1975. Johnny Carson petitioned NBC executives for the weekend shows to be pulled and saved so they could be aired during weeknights, allowing him to take time off. In response to that, Herbert Schlosser asked Dick Ebersol to create a show to fill the Saturday night time slot; and that’s where it all began.
Over the next weeks they worked together to create a high-concept comedy, satire including musical parodies and performances. SNL debuted on Oct. 11, 1975. Since then SNL has aired 975 episodes and began its 50th season on Sept. 28, 2024, making it one of the longest running television programs in the United States.
Throughout the five decades Saturday Night Live has been on air, it has received 84 Primetime Emmy Awards, six Writers Guild of America Awards and three Peabody Awards.
Unexpectedly, SNL has lost its popularity in the last few years because of controversial political skits. In 2021, season 47’s pilot episode decreased views and ratings by 3.5 million, a 35 percent decrease from the previous year’s opener. A majority of these falloffs have been from the 2020 election. Its post-election installment of SNL averaged only 4.4 million total viewers, losing more than half of the viewers in the post-election received in 2020.
Recently, SNL has been rising greatly in popularity. SNL put on a parody of ‘Espresso’ by Sabrina Carpenter, bringing on Ariana Grande to sing. After this episode, aired it drew a record breaking 516 million views across the late-night show’s social media platforms.
The show has also recently had Charli XCX as a host and musical guest, Billie Eilish, and Chappell Roan. Many celebrities, now being a part of this late-night show, watch brings in a lot of viewers, whether it be young watchers on TikTok or Instagram, or older people still watching, when the show goes live.
Zainab Munir, a student at West Potomac high school, recalls coming across the viral skit ‘Domingo’ on TikTok. “I was never really into Saturday Night Live, my parents never watched it,” she said. “When I was scrolling on TikTok in mid October, there was a huge obsession over this one video with Ariana Grande in it. I checked it out, turns out the video went viral on SNL’s account and became a trend for a while.”
