‘Saturday Night Live’ ratings: Adam Driver, Chris Stapleton see best ratings in two years

The numbers are officially in for this weekend’s “Saturday Night Live,” and Donald Trump no longer holds the title of top-rated show of the season.

Thanks in part to a late NFL game between the Arizona Cardinals and Green Bay Packers, the show hosted by Adam Driver (with musical guest Chris Stapleton) drew a 3.0 rating in the key adults 18-49 demographic. This is the show’s best rating since the Jimmy Fallon / Justin Timberlake episode all the way back in late 2013, so you can’t say that the game pushing back the start time of the show really hurt it too much. (Granted, we do think that if the game had remained exciting and ended about 30 minutes earlier, we probably would have seen something closer to a 3.2 or 3.3. NBC won’t quibble too much with the end result.)

The other great news about this episode is that we’ve long said that “SNL” really needs to take advantage of some of the opportunities when there are extra viewers watching the show to prove that the whole cynicism about the show “not being funny anymore” is not true. They did a much better job of this here than they did taking advantage of the extra viewers during the Trump show. (We’re not being political here; that show was just painful to get through comedy-wise.) Driver did a lot of different things, there were plenty of jokes for “Star Wars” fans, and Stapleton himself brought in a demographic that the show doesn’t always get.

Next weekend the show will return with Ronda Rousey and Selena Gomez, which could be another chance for “SNL” to reach out to people who don’t often watch. Granted, we don’t think we’ll see numbers anywhere close to a 3.0. Our guess is somewhere more along the lines of a 2.0 or 2.1.

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