TV Ratings: ‘SNL50’ Scores Nearly 15M Viewers for NBC and Peacock

The golden anniversary celebration for Saturday Night Live brought in ratings gold as well.

Sunday’s live SNL50: The Anniversary Special drew 14.8 million viewers on NBC and Peacock, based on Nielsen figures and internal numbers from NBCUniversal. The show is NBC’s biggest primetime entertainment telecast in five years, since 18.33 million people watched the 2020 Golden Globes.

The audience is also the second-largest for any non-sports primetime network show so far in the 2024-25 season, behind only the 15.4 million viewers for the Grammy Awards on CBS earlier in February. Sunday’s show more than tripled the same-day season average for regular episodes of SNL, which draw about 4.9 million viewers.

In the key ad-sales demographic of adults 18-49, SNL50 scored a 2.53 rating across NBC and Peacock, equivalent to about 3.39 million people in that age range. That’s also a five-year high for the network in primetime, excluding sports.

A red carpet special prior to the main show averaged 6.5 million viewers on NBC, E! and Peacock.

Sunday’s show featured reprisals of favorite sketches by current and former SNL castmembers, a heartfelt musical number from Adam Sandler and performances by Paul Simon and Sabrina Carpenter, Miley Cyrus and Brittany Howard, Lil Wayne with The Roots and Paul McCartney.

A decade ago, SNL’s 40th anniversary special drew 23.1 million viewers on NBC alone — albeit at a time when linear TV was still the dominant mode of viewing and tens of millions more U.S. homes had cable or satellite subscriptions. The 40th anniversary show came within 1.7 million viewers of that year’s Grammys (24.82 million); this year, the margin between the Grammys and SNL50 was about 600,000 viewrs.