I watched Saturday Night Live last night for the first time in years and so did a lot of other people. Entertainment Weekly reports that it was a ratings bonanza:
Donald Trump gives SNL its biggest ratings in yearsTrump is still bringing the bump.With Donald Trump hosting, Saturday Night Live jumped to its biggest overnight rating since 2012.According to NBC, SNL had a whopping 6.6 household rating on Saturday night, easily beating the season’s previous high: the 41st season premiere last month, hosted by Miley Cyrus and with a guest appearance by none other than … Hillary Clinton. In fact, Trump’s overnight rating was 47 percent higher than the Miley/Hillary episode.
The show wasn’t especially funny, but I don’t blame Trump for that because the show hasn’t been especially funny in years. Two moments, however, stood out near the beginning.
One came when the president of Mexico showed up at the White House to give President Trump a check for the border wall. The second was when the show mocked the people who wanted Trump to be heckled by having Larry David call Trump a racist from offstage and then claim he only did it because he heard he’d get $5,000 for doing so.
David was there to reprise his role as Bernie Sanders in the opening.
You can see that segment below:
Anti-Trumpers on the left didn’t like being mocked in such a way:
There’s also a liberal media narrative taking shape which suggests that the huge ratings don’t matter and that the cast did the show reluctantly.
Hank Stuever of the Washington Post:
Donald Trump’s highly touted and almost certainly inappropriate hosting gig on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” turned out to be an anemic and halfhearted dud. The ratings were high — SNL’s best in years — but they come with a heavy tax on the show’s integrity…Late-night TV fell hard for Trump and the traffic he brings. For months now, late-night shows have joked about and imitated Trump and, of course, invited him to appear as a guest. No one seems able to deal him the ultimate blow and ignore him.Yet, curiously, no one involved with Saturday’s SNL episode seemed to have the desire to participate in it or play with him.Traditionally, “Saturday Night Live” was meant to be a place where people holding or running for office are imitated, mocked and even skewered by the show’s actors and writers.
Right. Because we all know how hard SNL has been on Obama for the last seven years, don’t we?
Will Leitch of Bloomberg Business takes the same route as the Post:
Kind of Dead As Trump Hosts Saturday Night LiveThere’s a certain look a cast member gets that longtime viewers of “Saturday Night Live” can instantly recognize. In many ways, it’s this look, and the performer’s mastery of it, that separates the truly great “SNL” performers from your run-of-the-mill hacks. You know this look: It’s the “this is bombing, isn’t it?” look.
Having been unable to keep Trump from hosting the show, the left is doing the next best thing by denigrating the entire episode.
Ironically, it was the cold open (which didn’t involve Trump) which brought the most laughs by mocking Rachel Maddow and Democrats in MSNBC’s Democratic forum Friday night. The left probably didn’t find this funny either:
Featured image is a screen cap from Twitter.
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