In its 43rd season, NBC's venerable sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live continues to be at the center of the cultural conversation thanks to its sharp-edge satire of the Trump Administration.
The show, though, remains primarily a non-political comedy. As B&C reported last week, the top three most viral clips released by SNL on its social channels over the past 90 days haven’t been political (they were segments centered around Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman, a Super Bowl satire and a Cardi B musical performance).
We worked with Inscape, the TV measurement company with glass-level data from a panel of more than 8 million smart TVs and devices, and TV ad measurement company iSpot.tv to find out a little bit more about the audience watching Saturday Night Live.
Viewership heatmaps from Inscape reveal some regional differences in the households tuning in week to week. While the Denver, Spokane, Minneapolis and St. Louis DMAs continue to have a large audience base, the southeastern U.S. isn’t represented nearly as much. And during the March 3 episode, with Charles Barkley as the host and musical guest Migos, the West Coast tuned in more than usual. (On the maps below, the darker the color, the more households were tuning in, with the baseline normalized by each area’s population.)
Audience demographics from iSpot reveal that viewers are nearly evenly split male to female, with males skewing just slightly more, while 35-54 year-olds are the largest age group represented.
