After being on air for four decades, Saturday Night Live (SNL) celebrated their fortieth anniversary on Sunday, February, 15th with a three and a half hour show. Studio 8H in Rockefeller Plaza housed the event where they presented the show to its highest number of viewers, breaking a number of records.
With a variety of past hosts, former and current celebrities, comedians and many more guests, SNL‘s anniversary show was sure to impress. This episode became the most watched show on NBC since the Will and Grace finale in 2006 with 23.1 million viewers. Saturday Night Live brought forth more tweets than the NBA-All Star game which generated a mere one hundred and twenty-six tweets. While for SNL, nine Million people in the United States saw 1.3 million tweets sent by 449,000 users about the celebrity-packed episode, including a variety of pictures and gossip using the hashtag #SNL40. SNL also broke the record of having the highest unique audience of any series episode in the 2014-2015 season and the highest twitter television impressions of any series episode to date.
Stevie Martin said, “Tonight is like an enormous High School reunion” referring to former hosts and comedians like Tom Hanks, Derek Jeter, Alec Baldwin, Chris Rock, Melissa McCarthy and many more of the hundreds of performers and audience members. Comedian Veterans including Eddie Murphy, Will Ferrell, Jerry Seinfeld, and Larry David along with current pop-culture performers such as Taylor Swift, Kerry Washington, Kanye West and Miley Cyrus attended the SNL fortieth anniversary.
SNL viewer and mother of four, Veronica Fisher expressed her feelings on the fortieth anniversary episode saying, “It was very entertaining and brought back a lot of memories and old laughs. Unfortunately they fell short towards the end with Eddie Murphy.”
Throughout the episode many former comedians and hosts came up and performed their most memorable and most loved skits.
“I can’t believe how quickly Chevy Chase aged, I thought I was seeing things,” expressed Dolores Gordon, a frequent watcher of SNL.
Since season thirty-nine of Saturday Night Live ended, many viewers of the show had been predicting what would happen in the fortieth season. Some predicted that Kristen Wiig would be the host of the episode and the shows opener. If you tuned in on Sunday, then you know that Kristen Wigg did not host or even open the fortieth anniversary episode, in fact Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake opened with a five minute song about the shows many years, familiar characters and memorable catch phrases. Over a hundred former/current/new comedians were featured in the show together while performing several skits.
