Ryan Gosling Brings ‘SNL’ Its Most-Watched Episode Ever on Peacock
As host of the April 13 episode, Ryan Gosling brought “Saturday Night Live” its biggest Peacock audience ever when accounting for seven days of viewership.
While an exact number of Peacock viewers is not available, the episode’s seven-day total across all platforms is 8.9 million — up from the 1.7 million viewers who tuned in night-of. This comes from a combination of Nielsen’s measurement of linear viewers on NBC and NBCUniversal’s own data regarding streams on Peacock.
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This represents the show’s best seven-day viewership since December of 2021, when Billie Eilish served as both host and musical guest. Additionally, the episode rose from 0.3 rating among adults age 18-49 on April 13 to a seven-day rating of 2.0, the show’s highest since Dave Chappelle hosted in November 2022 with Foo Fighters as musical guest.
That’s to say nothing of YouTube, where individual sketches often drive huge viewership. 46 million people have viewed at least a portion of the episode on YouTube, with a total of 170 million views across all social platforms.
Among the most popular sketches was one that featured Gosling and Mikey Day dressed identically to the titular characters from “Beavis and Butt-Head” while sitting in the audience of a NewsNation town hall about AI technology — though both claimed to have never heard of the show. Multiple actors broke character while laughing at the costumes including Heidi Gardner, who said she’ll “never be able to shake” what she saw. Though Kenan Thompson managed to keep a straight face, he told Variety he “started to panic.”
You can watch Gosling’s episode of “SNL” on Peacock here.
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