‘Saturday Night Live UK’ Premieres With Healthy Ratings For Sky
‘Saturday Night Live UK’s first episode was hosted by Tina Fey (right)Sky/YouTube
Saturday Night Live landed in the UK with nearly 230,000 viewers.
Sky’s remake of NBC’s 50-year-old comedy series has had a mixed set of reviews, which skew positive on the whole, and has already produced a couple of breakout moments — not least Jack Shep’s memorable Princess Diana at David Attenborough’s spoof last supper.
Saturday Night Live UK was watched by 226,000 viewers in its 10PM slot on Sky One. That gave it a 3.2% share of the available TV audience at the time, according to official BARB figures supplied by overnights.tv.
The 226,000 viewers means it beat Channel 4 in the same slot — a rarity for any Sky show. Channel 4 broadcast Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation to 215,000 people. The best performing show at 10PM was the BBC News on BBC One, which was watched by nearly 2M viewers.
Saturday Night Live UK‘s debut trounced the U.S. version of the show, which is shown on Sky Comedy. Season 51 of NBC’s Saturday Night Live premiered with 6,800 viewers on October 5, 2025. Last week’s Harry Styles-hosted episode was watched by 4,550 viewers, though it did air 11.30PM.
Another useful comparator may be A League of Their Own, Sky’s biggest comedy entertainment series over more than a decade. The final season of A League of Their Own premiered on November 12 with 60,000 viewers, a quarter of SNL UK’s first audience. In its first season on Sky One, A League of Their Own got up to 600,000 viewers, in a sign of how audiences have fragmented over the years.
Sky has never put huge stock in overnight ratings. Even before the rise of streaming, the Comcast-owned broadcaster favored metrics that included repeat broadcasts and catch-up viewing. It means that the live audience for Saturday Night Live will just be one signal of the show’s success. Sky will also factor in viewing on Now, its streaming service, as well as the virality of online clips.
It is entirely plausible that a sketch could break out of SNL UK and generate more views than any of the broadcasts on the traditional TV network (one X/Twitter post featuring the cold open already has more than a million views). Saturday Night Live is also a comedy — and comedies notoriously take time to build an audience. UK viewers will be familiar with the U.S. version, but the British edition is created by a new team and is blooding a cast that is largely unfamiliar to TV viewers.
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