‘SNL’ Costs How Many Millions Per Episode?
Make no mistake — Saturday Night Live continues to be a moneymaker for NBC. While no network show draws the same kind of crowds that television managed in the pre-internet, pre-streaming days, SNL is by far the biggest juggernaut in late night. How big? An average SNL episode has more viewers, according to Nielsen, than Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel Live, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and Late Night with Seth Meyers — combined. It’s the #1 entertainment network series in the most important demographic, adults aged 18 to 49. Outside of live sports, nothing performs on traditional TV like Saturday Night Live.
That allows NBC to charge big bucks for SNL ads, says Vulture, even though fewer people watch it today than they did 10 years ago. Relative to advertisers’ other options, SNL is as valuable a property today as it has ever been.
But doing relatively well in the ratings doesn’t mean the show is as profitable as it could be. That’s because the show costs a reported $4 million an episode to produce. Gulp. That’s $100 million a year, a nine-figure investment for a show with a slowly eroding audience. With Lorne Michaels running interference, NBC keeps writing those comedy checks — for now. But what happens when Michaels eventually retires?
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“The budget is just going to get slashed,” Matthew Belloni said on The Town podcast this week. “The only reason you continue to support a $4-million-a-week variety show is because everyone is afraid of Lorne Michaels.”
In Belloni’s opinion, SNL is an exercise in excess, “doing 80 wigs and 150 costumes for each episode.” When Michaels is eventually out of the picture, Belloni predicts that Donna Langley, head of NBCUniversal, will look at SNL’s budget and take a red pen to several of its surplus line items. “There are 300 people in the credits every week,” he marveled. “That’s so many people.”
Belloni’s producer Craig Horlbeck pushed back. “But there’s something about the fact that they have all those people making wigs that’s cool!”
“That’s why I hope that it would stick around,” Belloni replied. “But it won’t, post-Lorne.”
The bottom line is the bottom line, and SNL “can be more profitable,” Belloni argued. He exchanged messages with “a prominent producer in this space” who estimated that a million bucks could be cut from each SNL episode’s budget and viewers wouldn’t notice the difference.
“First of all, Lorne’s fee is enormous,” Belloni said. “Secondly, there are all sorts of EPs and friends and people that have been there forever and duplicative jobs. All the sets are made original. You could take money out of that show without hurting the show.”
At some point, a new day is coming for SNL. According to Belloni’s accounting, removing the Michaels overhead alone should make the show cheaper to produce. But take note, Tina Fey, Seth Meyers or whoever takes over Saturday Night Live — you might be getting pizza on Tuesday nights rather than a host dinner at Orso’s.
