SNL Strives to Keep Election Momentum

It's been a banner year for Saturday Night Live, which has enjoyed record ratings since Tina Fey first teased her hair, donned a bracelet-sleeve blazer, and started dropping her g's in a parody of Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Or so goes the conventional wisdom.

In the show's season premiere, on September 13, SNL had more than 10 million viewers, and received its highest rating since 2001.

A guest appearance by Palin herself a month later garnered almost 15 million viewers for the October 18 episode. That is the show's biggest audience in 14 years. When Republican presidential nominee John McCain appeared on the show two weeks later, viewer numbers skyrocketed again--to 13 million.

These numbers have been plastered all over headlines and press releases, proving that political cameos in this highly contested election season have translated to viewership gold for SNL.

But with the election behind us, Sarah Palin is off the national stage, and Tina Fey will likely stick to her knitting on 30 Rock. A cameo from President-elect Barack Obama is exceedingly unlikely. And maintaining those record-breaking numbers may be harder than ever for the show.

For one thing, SNL episodes this season without political guest stars haven't garnered even half the viewership of the episodes with high-profile cameos. SNL's second episode of the season, for example, drew only 6.9 million viewers. The number rebounded to 7.8 million a week later, but even that was well under the season's highs attracted by the McCain and Palin cameos.

Last election season, in 2004, SNL's first seven episodes averaged 7.1 million viewers. The average so far this season is 9.3 million.

Further compounding SNL's post-election viewer defection is the fact that, with most networks shows, audience interest is generally higher in the first half of the season than the second. That's especially true here.

"SNL has found new relevance," says John Rash, senior vice president and director for broadcast negotiations at the Campbell Mithun advertising agency in Minneapolis. That relevance, he says, stems in part from the show's "often becoming part of the news narrative itself."

Going forward, "it will miss the immediacy of November 4, as well as larger-than-life characters like Governor Sarah Palin." But most difficult for the show, believes Rash, is the lack of a breakout star like Fey, or even Amy Poehler, the show's female lead until her maternity leave took her off the air recently.

Still, NBC executives likely aren't complaining. SNL, which is constantly open to criticism from viewers who miss the heydays of the '80s, had audiences as small as 3.8 million for some episodes last season. Next to the new numbers, this season's highs look like a lucky lightning strike.

But we all know how often those happen.

by Sophia Banay

Top: Darrell Hammond as Senator John McCain, Tina Fey as Governor Sarah Palin, and Will Farrell as President George W. Bush. Photograph by Dana Edelson/NBCUAP