Saturday Night Live ratings with Kumail Nanjiani, P!nk win big for NBC

While we were very excited for Kumail Nanjiani to host Saturday Night Live, we weren’t quite sure what the ratings would be. He’s a guy who we love — and so do many of the people we know — but we weren’t sure about mainstream America. The Big Sick was beloved, but it also wasn’t a movie that dominated the box office to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Sometimes we are very happy to be surprised. This week is one of those times. This past show with Kumail generated in total a 2.2 rating in the 18-49 demographic, which is the best rating for any episode so far this season. It outperformed both the premiere episode hosted by Ryan Gosling and the week prior with Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot. You can argue that P!nk as a musical guest was a ratings draw, but we’d say that the presence of a fresh face (at least for SNL viewers) in Kumail was appealing to many of them. Plus, you almost always know that comedians are going to be good hosts. We especially enjoyed his monologue last night, not that this is any surprise.

In general, this episode with Nanjiani and P!nk was the second-best performance from a week three edition of the show in the past six years, with the one exception being of course the one last year in the midst of the Presidential Election. (We love that NBC is throwing this in here as a caveat in most of their ratings press releases, reminding us that last year’s ratings were enormous and it’s going to be almost impossible for them to be topped in the near future.

Hopefully, these ratings mean that Kumail will get a chance to host SNL again at some point in the future — we’re going to at least remain hopeful that this is going to happen.

As for Larry David…

With the news out there that he is going to be hosting the next edition of the show on November 4 we’re immediately curious about how his edition of the show is going to fare. We know that there is going to be a ton of enthusiasm coming off of what he did with Bernie Sanders a good year and a half ago, but is the enthusiasm for Bernie impressions still there? Probably not. The appeal of Larry at this point is probably more from Curb Your Enthusiasm fans who love watching him there and will celebrate another opportunity in order to check him out on TV.

If you missed it, you can head over to the link here in the event you do want to get some more news regarding David’s big SNL hosting return — including who his musical guest will be!

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