‘Saturday Night Live’ ratings: Woody Harrelson, Kendrick Lamar’s show generates decent numbers

How about this for some “Saturday Night Live” news worth celebrating? The show this weekend hosted by Woody Harrelson, and featuring a musical performance from Kendrick Lamar, may have actually far surpassed anything that we were expecting from it, given that the former “Cheers” star is not necessarily an A-List star, and we don’t know how the man was going to fare.

Overall, though, the show was only down slightly from the one hosted by Chris Rock two weeks ago. With a 2.3 rating in the 18-49 demographic, the show was higher-rated than the shows hosted by Chris Pratt, Sarah Silverman, and even Bill Hader making his quick return to the show. None of those episodes even managed to get within two tenths of a point of how this one did.

With all of this being said, we are not completely set just yet to declare that the sort-of-slump for the late-night show is over. That will be after we get through the show hosted by Cameron Diaz next week, which could be an even harder sell that Woody. At least he had “True Detective” recently, while Diaz hasn’t had a big movie in theaters for a little while now. Maybe the return of Bruno Mars (joining Mark Ronson) as a musical guest could be a little bit of boost in that regard.

In the end, though, the best thing “SNL” can do is establish a better comedy reputation after a slow start to the season.. If they can pull that off, then some of the other things will start to improve.

Do you think the show deserved these big numbers? Share with a comment, and head over here to read our review for this episode! Also, you can sign up to get some further TV updates on everything we cover right now via our official CarterMatt Newsletter. (Photo via NBC.)