The first-ever edition of “Saturday Night Live U.K.,” which aired from 10 p.m. on pay TV channel Sky One, drew a solid 226,000 viewers.
The show, which starred Tina Fey, and also featured Graham Norton, and was overseen by executive producer Lorne Michaels, had a 3.2% share of the TV audience at the time, according to official BARB figures supplied by overnights.tv.
It beat Channel 4 in the same slot, which had screened “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation,” with 215,000 viewing. The “SNL U.K.” performance was almost four times that achieved by “A League of Their Own,” Sky’s biggest entertainment show, and surpassed the U.S. version of “SNL” on Sky Comedy channel, which took 5,000 last week.
The news on BBC One led the 10 p.m. time period with almost 2 million viewers and a 25% share.
Variety reviewer Scott Bryan was generally upbeat when assessing the show.
“Thankfully, ‘Saturday Night Live U.K.’ largely took the basics of what makes the U.S. version successful — sketch comedy, rotating guest hosts and the unpredictability of live television — and left the Brits to it. That’s where it works,” he wrote, adding “the sketches are darker and more surreal than its U.S. counterpart, the comedy much more deadpan.”
He concluded, “Market it as one of the only places you can watch live comedy and music at a time on British TV when there’s shockingly little of both, and they might be onto a winner.”
Critical reaction elsewhere was also (tentatively) positive. The Independent’s Nick Hilton gave it three stars out of five, commenting it had “some hits, some misses, and a bang-on Princess Di impression.”
Hilton applauded the show’s “willingness to push the envelope, to risk bad taste.”
He added, “Borrowing a beloved American format might feel a bit stale, but there are notes of new ingredients that could offer something fresh.”
The Guardian’s Lucy Mangan gave it the same score. “The general feeling, I think, will be that the inaugural episode of ‘Saturday Night Live U.K.’ […] did work,” she said.
“It could have been a lot, lot worse,” she added. “And it could have been a lot better… honestly – it felt refreshing to see an ambition/piece of madness like retooling a legacy U.S. brand for this septic isle even being attempted.”
Charlotte Ivers in the Sunday Times welcomed the edgier humor. “There’s something quite refreshing about seeing TV comedians really push close to the line,” she said, before adding, “Sadly, in many cases the jokes don’t live up to the risk.”
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