‘Saturday Night Live’ Prince tribute draws stronger ratings than recent new episodes

Whether it be the power of nostalgia or the mere amount of love that was out there for Prince, it is pretty darn clear that viewers were interested in the tribute special on “Saturday Night Live” this weekend honoring the legacy of Prince. Hosted in part by Jimmy Fallon, the event (which included many musical performances and sketches revolving around him over the years) ended up posting a better rating than ironically any new episode of the show in the past month.

Specifically, we’re talking about in total a 2.1 rating in the 18-49 demographic, which is up from the 1.9 posted by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. This really is not bad when you consider for a minute that this was a clip show put together at the very last minute, and we would not even necessarily say that Prince was iconic to “SNL” and its entire history given he really only performed on it a few times. His music just transcended this and really every other show out there, which is why his impact still remains so large.

Just for good measure, we’ve included a classic sketch below featuring Fred Armisen as the singer and Maya Rudolph as Beyonce, hosting a fake talk show that featured an appearance from Shia LaBeouf as Tobey Maguire and Amy Poehler as Nancy Grace. The big standout to us other than the great Prince impression is actually just how good Shia’s impression here is. It’s a nice reminder of the massive talent that he has, which is something we don’t often see much of anymore in the midst of so many other headlines.

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