"SNL" in Hot Water After Ratings Show Americans Are Sick of the Anti-Trump Dialogue
Back in the days of the greats like Steve Martin, Dan Aykroyd, Jane Curtin and Bill Murray, to name a few, “Saturday Night Live” used to score big ratings every week, with its highest rating of 13.5 being recorded during its fifth season in 1978-1979.
Unfortunately for the show’s producer and original creator, Lorne Michaels, those days are long, long, long past us now.
According to Deadline Hollywood, the latest episode of “SNL” scored a paltry 4.3 rating, with an even more awful 1.8 rating among its key demographic of adults between the ages of 18 and 49.
And this despite it airing on the same day as the 2018 Women’s March and even featuring a female host, actress Jessica Chastain.
Deadline further noted these ratings were only marginally lower than the previous week’s ratings: “That was down from last week’s telecast … which drew a 4.6 HH rating and a 1.9 in 18-49 and went on to log “SNL’s” largest viewership of the season.”
Yeah, the show that used to post numbers as high as 13.5 for the 1978-1979 season, as noted by The Wrap, achieved a “record high” this season when it posted meager ratings of only 4.6 and 1.9, respectively.
That’s pathetic …
But it’s also notably different than the show’s performance’s last year, when it notched “a 3.51 average adults 18-49 rating,” according to Vulture magazine.
This rise in ratings was admittedly precipitated by the show’s brutal attacks on President Donald Trump and his family, which the show’s viewers apparently liked.
“Almost every cold open — the sketch that kicks off the show — included impersonations of Trump or lampooned his administration. Resident Trump impersonator Alec Baldwin played him in all but three of them,” The Washington Post noted last year.
So what happened? Either the show’s jokes got lame — though the argument could be made that they’ve been lame for decades — or the American people have simply grown tired of “SNL’s” anti-Trump shtick.
In fact, a poll conducted early last year by Morning Consult found that, even by then, 19 percent of “SNL” viewers admitted they had originally enjoyed the anti-Trump jokes but wanted the show “to focus on something else” besides the president, as reported by Breitbart.
Another 16 percent said they never “enjoyed the impersonations of the members of President Trump’s administration,” period.
That meant over a third of the show’s viewers had already grown fed up with “SNL’s” constant anti-Trump jokes by the start of 2017.
It’s now 2018 and “SNL” continues to obsessively lampoon Trump, and I suspect that may very well be the reason why its ratings continue to falter.
H/T The Daily Caller
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