This article was originally published on reverb, Drake Cooper’s reflections on advertising, creativity, and trends. Read more.

SNL 40 Lifts NBC to 10-Year High

Photo Of The Cast Of SNL

SNL (Saturday Night Live for those you from Outer Space) had it’s 40th Anniversary Special this past Saturday – with Eddie Murphy’s grand return that lasted all of 73 seconds. He hasn’t been back to SNL in gosh I think 30 years? Anyway, this super-versary coupled with all the promotion leading up to the star-studded, cameo-laden event sky-rocketed SNL’s ratings to 7.8/21 in A18-49 (that’s huge, you guys.) This is now NBC’s top-rated Prime Time entertainment special in 10 years (The Friends Clips show that aired prior to the series finale on 2/6/04 got a 16.7 rating.) Usually SNL hovers around the 1 rating point nationally.

Twitter ratings: 9.1 MM people saw 1.3 MM tweets about SNL, sent by 449k people, generating 188 MM twitter TV impressions. This is the highest Unique Audience of any series episode to-date in the 2014-2015 season.

Here is one of my favorite SNL’s – John Belushi’s Samurai Delicatessen. My dad loved it so much that one of my dolls was named Samurai Baby and the name stuck – probably because she did a killer impression of him. (Picture the low guttural conversation noises and then a yelling doll flying through the air… I laughed for hours.)

There are so many great things that have come out of SNL over the years, quotes that have permeated our daily conversations – what are some of your favorite sketches?

chris farley

All info courtesy of Nielsen and pictures from NBC.

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