‘Saturday Night Live’ ratings: Russell Crowe – Margo Price show drops below Peter Dinklage broadcast

Bad news for “Saturday Night Live” this weekend: Not only was their show with Russell Crowe and musical guest Margo Price potentially the worst of the season, but it also brought in one of the worst overall ratings that we’ve seen so far this season.

The episode in total drew just a 1.8 rating in the 18-49 demographic, which matches the almost-as-woeful outing (at least for us) hosted by Jonah Hill earlier this season, and is a drop of a tenth in the demo from last week’s show hosted by Peter Dinklage.

Why didn’t “SNL” fare better this weekend? Obviously, viewers on the East Coast didn’t know in advance that this was going to be a colossal dud, so we mostly just blame it on a combination of it being spring (so viewers may have been out enjoying the weekend) and the overall star power not being much of a factor in getting people to watch. It’s been years since we would consider Crowe to be a huge box-office draw; even during the opening monologue, two out of the three movies referenced in “Gladiator” and “A Beautiful Mind” were more than a decade old. Meanwhile, country singer Price has some fans, but she is still a relative unknown to mainstream audiences and this was more of a musical guest in the “discover her” vein.

You can check out the full episode broken down by sketches during our latest review article here — granted, we debated for a while not putting them up so that you would not have to suffer through some of them, but it’s our duty to give you them every week, so we posted them. Just don’t be upset if they don’t meet your expectations, at least other than the sketch featuring Leslie Jones as a ninja. We laughed during that one.

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