‘SNL’ Is Surprisingly Huge on TikTok
For a 50-year-old, Saturday Night Live is doing a decent job keeping up with the kids.
Hat tip to Redditor galitsalahat_ for recognizing a fact that’s been right in front of us all along: SNL is killing it on TikTok. The example given today in the r/LiveFromNewYork subreddit: Jane Wickline appeared at the Weekend Update desk last weekend to perform a song in the persona of Sabrina Carpenter. I’ve updated the statistics from the hours-old post, but the conclusion remains the same:
- On YouTube, the sketch has 13K likes and 553K views.
- On Facebook, it has 3.5K likes and 534K views.
- On Instagram, it has 68.3K likes and 1.5 million views.
- On TikTok, it has 994K likes and 7.1 million views.
Let’s put this another way: Wickline’s song has about 4.5 times as many views on TikTok as it does on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram combined. You could chalk it up to Wickline’s already established popularity on TikTok, but the disparity holds true for most SNL videos. Saturday night’s cold open, for example, has a million YouTube views and 3.6 million on TikTok. A breakout video like “Domingo” racks up views everywhere, but as @galitsalahat_ points out, it’s not uncommon for any random SNL sketch to hit a million watches on TikTok.
Saturday Night Live seems to have noticed as well. On this season’s Michael Keaton episode, the show brought back a recurring sketch that’s basically a scroll through TikTok and its trademark personalities. For viewers who don’t use the app, the references to trad wives, foodies and fitness girls might seem completely random, but constant users got the jokes all too well.
Thanks to Andy Samberg’s “Lazy Sunday,” SNL often gets credit for bringing YouTube into the national consciousness. (After the video got millions of views — unheard of back in the 2000s — NBC ordered the video taken down. Who needs that kind of free publicity?) While the show has built out its YouTube presence in recent years with behind-the-scenes videos and cut-for-time, second-chance sketches, TikTok is now SNL’s most successful outlet.
In many ways, there’s no better method for creating a new generation of fans. Watching the live broadcast, at 90 minutes and full of commercial breaks, can be a slog. But nearly every episode has hilarious moments. TikTok not only allows viewers to sample the show’s best bits but to remix them for their own creative purposes.
The Wrap recently proclaimed Saturday Night Live was in its TikTok era. The show garnered more than a billion views on social platforms through the first four shows of Season 50, up 178 percent from last season. It’s no accident, according to one former SNL staffer. “They didn’t adjust the format to fit SNL,” they said. “They’re adjusting SNL to fit culture, which I think is really smart.”