‘Saturday Night Live’ ratings: Lin-Manuel Miranda, Twenty One Pilot show draws impressive ratings

For the second straight week, the folks over at “Saturday Night Live” have a rather-tremendous amount to celebrate when it comes to the ratings. The premiere drew some of the best numbers for a beginning of a season in years, and that seemed to stretch over now for the second episode with host Lin-Manuel Miranda and musical guest Twenty One Pilots.

As a whole, the show drew a 5.2 household rating on average, which ties the best total for a second episode since James Franco hosted all the way back with Kings of Leon in 2008. Meanwhile, its 18-49 demo rating of a 2.4 is the best for the show since 2013, which is when Miley Cyrus served as both the host and the musical guest for the evening. These ratings are slightly slanted because they don’t include many key East Coast markets, which were impacted by Hurricane Matthew and therefore would skew them in all sorts of directions.

It’s not altogether difficult to figure out why “SNL” is killing it at the moment: Almost all of it can tie back to Donald Trump, and the enormous amount of attention that is surrounding his Presidential candidacy at the moment. Getting a big star like Alec Baldwin to play the character was a tremendous boost to the series, and the same goes for having recent Emmy winner Kate McKinnon as Hillary Clinton.

We imagine that the big numbers are going to continue leading up to the election, and that is probably one of the other reasons why there are several new episodes still to come this month. We’ve got Emily Blunt and Tom Hanks hosting the next two weekends. It remains to be seen whether or not there will be a show on October 29, but it would make some sense given that election day is right around the corner.

Want to take out our review from this weekend? Then head over to the link here; we’ve also got a few videos for select sketches posted. (Photo: NBC.)