SNL By the Numbers, Seasons 35-43
As SNL celebrated its 50th anniversary recently, you no doubt heard the cries: “The show isn’t funny anymore,” “It has never been funny,” “Put it out of its misery,” and the like.
Typically, the people who claim the show isn’t funny anymore refuse to offer up a time period in which they do believe the show was funny, because that would then open them up for criticism. But one of the driving ideas behind our project to watch every season was to actually codify, as a scientific researcher would, every sketch, episode and season to see who’s right. When was the show funny? Should it be put out of its misery?
Every few seasons, we have been posting our coding results. For seasons 1-25, go here, and for seasons 26-35 go here. (In those posts, there are extra links that will take you to more granular numbers.)
We are now up to Season 43, so before we get to the end, it seems like a good time to look back at the years since the 35th anniversary.
Here’s a chart of the first 43 seasons:
The grading scale is simple: an all-time classic sketch gets a “5,” while only the most appalling sketches get a “1.” A pretty average episode will come in at around a 2.5, while a really good episode will top 3.0.
You will notice there are distinct peaks in the quality of the show, interspersed with fallow periods. This almost always tracks with legendary cast members that come and go. For instance, take a look this way:
Red - Original cast (Minus Chevy Chase, and John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd left after Season 4.)
Green - Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, Jon Lovitz, Dennis Miller
Purple - Will Ferrell
Yellow - Kristen Wiig
Interestingly, as we noted on the podcast, the season after Wiig left, the show got even better, as cast members like Bill Hader, Fred Armisen, Vanessa Bayer, and Jason Sudeikis got their time to shine. (And technically, Hartman was still on the show in Season 19, but almost all of his original castmates had left him and new stars like Chris Farley, Adam Sandler, and Rob Schneider had taken over the show.)
But it is easy to see how much the quality of the show is driven by its biggest stars. Sadly, perhaps the show’s biggest star, Eddie Murphy, wasn’t enough to carry the show to the heights of the other years. His supporting cast simply wasn’t good enough.
Here are the individual charts for seasons 36-43:
So with all of that out of the way, we can take a look at our list of highest-graded episodes of all time. Since the last time we ran the numbers, only two episodes crept on to the list - the Season 42 Tom Hanks episode, which included “Black Jeopardy!” and “Haunted Elevator” (better known as the debut of David S. Pumpkins), and the Martin Short-hosted Season 38 Christmas episode.
Here’s the list, with Host / Grade (Season and Episode):
Steve Martin 3.87 (S3 E18)
Tom Hanks 3.85 (S14 E1)
David Alan Grier 3.65 (S21 E8)
Christopher Walken 3.625 (S18 E4)
Tom Hanks 3.6 (S16 E8)
Steve Martin 3.55 (S4 E4)
Betty White 3.45 (S35 E21)
Tom Hanks 3.45 (S42 E4)
Ralph Nader 3.4 (S2 E11)
Paul Simon 3.4 (S13 E8)
Julia Louis-Dreyfus 3.4 (S31 E18)
Steve Wonder 3.38 (S8 E19)
Martin Short 3.375 (S38 E10)
Eric Idle 3.35 (S5 E2)
Jerry Seinfeld 3.35 (S17 18)
We are now in the home stretch, with only seven more seasons to go. To keep up to date on our ongoing project, please subscribe to Wasn’t That Special either on a monthly or annual basis. And if you subscribe at the Executive Producer level, you get a whole bunch of extra benefits, from our clips package to our behind-the-scenes notes. Join now!