Saturday Night Live: Octavia Spencer ratings solid; what’s the impact of a bad episode?

It’s been no secret that this season of Saturday Night Live is producing a little bit of a ratings renaissance for NBC, but there is an enormous question that must still be asked: What is the overall impact of a poor episode of the show? Will the Octavia Spencer ratings actually signal a downturn?

Last night’s episode (read our full review for it here) drew a solid 2.3 rating in the 18-49 demographic — while down significantly from the last episode hosted by Alec Baldwin, this was still well above the average for March one season ago. In terms of household rating, its 5.2 was the second-strongest of the season since the Dave Chappelle episode following the Presidential Election. (For the record, the one that was higher was the Baldwin episode.)

Before moving forward, we want to say that the majority of last night’s failure does not fall on Spencer as a host. While she didn’t do much that necessarily blew us away, she wasn’t given many opportunities since, other than an inspired reference to The Help in the opening, the majority of the situations given to her by the writers were pretty safe.

In general, we don’t like to be in the “SNL writers are terrible” camp because they don’t often get enough credit for great stuff. Yet, last night can be pinned almost entirely on them for both bad ideas and bad execution of the ideas. Too many sketches were of the variety of “here’s a funny concept, so let’s beat said concept into the ground a hundred more times.” Take, for example, Spencer playing an “edgy” friend who is really not that edgy at all, or a creepy man who repeatedly tries to win his job back through selling chocolate. The ideas just weren’t there, and after such a brilliant season, it’s hard to know what happened. It felt almost like they were all so transfixed on Donald Trump that they didn’t know what to do without Alec Baldwin being available to them for the show.

Next week, there’ll be an opportunity for something better with Scarlett Johansson officially joining the five-timers’ club. We have to hope that Baldwin will be there as another member, and there could be some other great cameos, as well.

Do you think that the poor show this weekend will scare viewers away from future SNL episodes? share in the comments below! (Photo: NBC.)