Why SNL 50 bombed in the ratings

On my favorite Hollywood-focused podcast The Town, host Matt Belloni and his producer and guests offer predictions all the time on television ratings, relying on the Nielsen numbers for reference for what’s anticipated versus what it turns out to be. Predictions for Saturday Night Live‘s fiftieth anniversary had it tracking above 20 million viewers — a reasonable expectation given the year-long promotional campaign and the fact that it would be on NBC, streaming on Peacock and on E! Network at the same time. The conversation on The Town was mostly a debate about whether it would hit 25 million, putting it well above expectations for the Oscars.

Instead, it came in far lower, not even getting to 15 million — below the Grammy Awards, for sake of comparison. It’s hard to read this as anything other than an indication of how much comedy has moved on from SNL. Just like every other Democratic-run institution, the age of its top brass has become a major defect — Lorne Michaels is just shy of the age of Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden. And the fact that even recently popular people like Bill Hader wouldn’t make time for it is telling: there’s just an absence of comedy from the nation’s most prominent comedy show.

It would be easy to dunk on SNL for being out of touch or drowning in leftist pablum, incapable of navigating a genuinely absurd era in American life after swinging so far away from the average comedy viewer during 2016 — climaxing in the horrendous and still widely mocked “Hallelujah” performance by Kate McKinnon as Hillary Clinton. But there’s something else going on here which traditionalists and conservatives shouldn’t welcome as a good thing: the degradation of the American monoculture.

The truth is that Saturday Night Live as an institution was not all that much kinder to George W. Bush than it was to Donald Trump, nor is it as screechingly unfunny and out of touch as the plethora of white male late night hosts from Jimmy to Seth to Stephen to Jon to John and back to Jimmy again. And SNL is willing to allow some hosts to say things none of those other showrunners will, thanks to the stature of people like Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr, Chris Rock, Adam Sandler — and the newest talent who became so popular he couldn’t be denied the role, Shane Gillis.

The point is that as with so many things, the decayed nature of a cultural institution, even one that still has much to offer an audience, requires that it change, adapt and bring new leadership instead of just getting stuck in a generational rut. We’re well past the point where Tina Fey should have brought a Gen X perspective to the show. The message here is the same as the message for Star Wars and James Bond and all these other big languishing cultural properties: boomers just need to retire already. Why do we have a vice president who’s four decades younger than the man in charge of the biggest show in comedy? It’s ridiculous.

This isn’t ageist. It’s about being willing to try new things instead of just sticking with the safetyism of old dull slow-moving retreads. It’s incredible to see this finally taking place in politics before it takes hold in culture (and the reasons why are worth considering). But for all the talk of disruption and new eras in content creation, SNL will remain on its slow path of cultural irrelevance so long as they’re still trotting out Tom Hanks front and center and putting Tim Robinson in the background. Please, Lorne, can’t we just try something new?