SNL was tough to rank. So hit or miss over 50 years. There’s a lot of nostalgia from decades ago but man some of the skits from the 70s both really sucked and some were gold. I think the issue they’ve had over the last decade is the talent and writing isn’t quite as good. There’s still some really funny stuff they hit on so it’s perfect to catch clips of. I hope it stays on the air for a while still.
I think ilov80s nailed it. Judge the top 10% and toss the rest. The 10% is epic.
I think this is a weird take, but that is what makes these threads fun.
It’s just a different type of show than say Ozark or Friends. Friends had 236 episodes at about 22 minutes long. Thats roughly 5200 minutes. SNL has had 939 episodes at about 70 minutes which gives us 65,700 minutes. So if we say every minute of Friends was great and it didn’t have a single wasted minute. It’s still about 1300 minutes less than the best 10% of SNL.
If you sat down and watched every episode of Friends and then watched only the top 10% of SNL, you would spend 22 more hours watching Samburg, Radner, Carvey and company.
Don’t even get me started on Ozarks. It would need another 1000+ episodes to fill the same time as SNL has aired for. They struggled to fill 44 episodes.
I would probably laugh about the same amount though.
I get it, and it's not even criticism of it being in the top 10. That is where I expected it based on talent that went through there, and it's impact on culture. I think what this brings to light is just the different nature of this countdown vs. others and what TV brings to the table vs movies or music. It could also be how I overthink things, especially ratings and rankings. I just found the comment and idea of just looking at the 10% of a show as the grade to be an odd concept. As somebody who is not a fan, I read your math as saying there is a lot of dead space to weed through to get to the really funny bits. That is a weird thing to say about a top 10 show, IMO. It's odd to me it lasted 50 years if that is a general sentiment of the show, or that it was pretty bad for long stretches of time as casts change. I also think it's weird that we will also have a show in the top 10 that most of us also agree turned quite bad for the last few seasons of it's run. I wouldn't put a movie in my top 10 that I can't watch the last 45 mins of, and I wouldn't put an album in a top 10 if 1/2 the songs were skippable.