If only Saturday Night Live could turn 40 every week. NBC’s marathon-length SNL anniversary special delivered enormous ratings Sunday night. The episode averaged an incredible 23.1 million viewers and a 7.8 rating among adults 18-49 during the prime-time portion of its three-and-a-half hour telecast.
According to NBC, this is the network’s most-watched prime-time entertainment telecast (so excluding Super Bowl coverage) in more than 10 years—since the ERfinale in 2004. Among the adult demo, it’s the top-rated primetime entertainment telecast in more than eight years (since the Will & Grace finale in 2006).
Records were also broken on Twitter, with 9.1 million people seeing 1.3 million tweets about the special, earning SNL the highest number of Twitter TV impressions of any series episode to date, as measured by Nielsen Social.
The special may have been helped by severe cold on the East Coast, which had residents being advised to stay indoors, as well as a lack of competition from rival broadcast networks.
For more, check out EW.com’s coverage of the red carpet, the opening sketch with Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake, the revival of Celebrity Jeopardy, and the special’s highs and lows.
