We’re now about halfway through Season 51 of NBC’s Saturday Night Live.
Ahead of the show’s January 17 return—with first-time host Finn Wolfhard (Stranger Things), musical guest A$AP Rocky, and minus the great Bowen Yang—let’s see who has risen to the top… or dropped to the bottom… of the screen time rankings after the first nine episodes.
Ashley Padilla 64:10 (11.4%)
Ashley Padilla has been the breakout star of Season 51, leading the cast in screen time as a second-year featured player. Her longest appearances came as the co-host of Shop TV with Mikey Day in the Sabrina Carpenter episode (04:28), a woman debuting a new haircut in Glen Powell’s episode (04:08), and a “Weekend Update” appearance with Andrew Dismukes as “Two People Who Just Hooked Up” (04:07). It’s no surprise that Padilla is the statistically most-improved cast member while she dominates every category, as her screen time average is up a whopping 152% from her rookie year. In fact, she’s already surpassed her Season 50 total (56:32) just nine episodes into her second year.
Colin Jost 60:24 (10.7%)
Colin Jost, now in his 13th season, has branched out more from behind the “Weekend Update” desk, with two Cold Open appearances as Secretary Pete Hegseth accounting for 12.3% of his screen time. He also made an appearance in the “Home Alone” spoof in the Christmas episode hosted by Ariana Grande. Jost led the cast in screen time in Season 50 with over 2 hours and 14 minutes, and he’s on almost an identical pace this year.
Sarah Sherman 57:21 (10.2%)
Sarah Sherman finished last season with a career-best 2 hours, 2 minutes, and 2 seconds of screen time. She is on pace to top that this season by at least five minutes. Two “Update” appearances (as Rhonda from Long Island, and a Drunk Raccoon) helped Sherman hit the six-hour screen time milestone this season. “Bob Army” and “AI Photos” from Glen Powell’s week were her two longest sketch appearances of the season.
Bowen Yang 54:35 (9.7%)
Bowen Yang finished his SNL career strong, with his second-highest screen time tally (13:12) in Ariana Grande’s episode. The prior week’s show hosted by Josh O’Connor saw Bowen have his first 10-minute episode (10:39) since last year’s Martin Short Christmas outing (11:27). His career stat line wraps up just four appearances shy of hitting 400, and less than 15 minutes away from 10 total hours of screen time.
Chloe Fineman 53:52 (9.6%)
Chloe Fineman, now the most tenured female cast member, has the second-most improved screen time average behind Ashley Padilla, with a nearly 80% increase. She leads the cast in pretape screen time (07:56, appearing in 12 out of 20) and is currently in a tight race with Padilla for most appearances (44 vs. 46). She looks to hit the two-hour screen time mark in Season 51 for the first time in her career.
Andrew Dismukes 49:39 (8.8%)
Dismukes remains the only cast member to not drop below four minutes in any Season 51 episode so far. He led the cast in appearances in Season 50 with 79, and is on pace (along with Sarah Sherman) to top that with 87. At 03:43, “Sunday Supper” with Melissa McCarthy was Dismukes’ longest appearance outside his “Two People Who Just Hooked Up” with Ashley Padilla on “Weekend Update.” He is set to hit seven hours of career screen time early in 2026.
James Austin Johnson 49:05 (8.7%)
Appearing as President Trump in seven out of this season’s nine Cold Opens, James Austin Johnson leads the cast in a runaway for Cold Open time (nearly 23 minutes, accounting for nearly 47% of his time this season). He also is set to pass Alec Baldwin’s record of 53 Trump appearances by the end of Season 51. Two of JAJ’s notable non-Trump appearances came in Nikki Glaser’s episode, where he led the “Pilot” and “Mechanical Bull” sketches. Johnson made his 300th career appearance in Ariana Grande’s Christmas episode.
Mikey Day 41:52 (7.4%)
More than 80% of Mikey Day’s screen time in Season 51 has come via good old fashioned live sketches (not counting Cold Opens, Monologues, and “Weekend Update”), having appeared in 21/51 of them so far. Day averaged exactly 05:49 per episode in both Season 48 and 49 before dropping to 05:17 in Season 50. In his 10th season as a cast member, he’s down another 12%, averaging 04:39. Reprising Shop TV’s “Rhett,” portraying The Grinch on “Love Is Blind” and battling Kenan Thompson’s “Black Santa Claus” in court were bright spots in Day’s sketch portfolio.
Kenan Thompson 38:40 (6.9%)
Halfway through his 23rd season, Kenan Thompson’s screen time average has dropped steadily since Season 48, but is down just over 2% from last year. He scored his best night of this season when Miles Teller returned to host in early November, racking up 10:02, one of just seven 10+ minute episodes by cast members this season.
Marcello Hernández 36:11 (6.4%)
Despite a strong first episode with host Bad Bunny ft. the return of Domingo aka Season 50’s most viral character, Marcello Hernández has had the biggest screen time drop in the cast, down more than 18% from last season’s average. This season, 26% of his time has come via “Weekend Update” over three appearances. Hernández is set to make his 200th career appearance when the show returns in 2026.
Michael Che 33:40 (6.0%)
Michael Che had a strong Christmas episode, where he welcomed back Aidy Bryant and Bowen Yang’s “Trend Forecasters” and commented to Kam Patterson (playing his 12 year-old nephew) that he “works here…kinda”. His screen time overall is down 14.4% from last year, and he has not made an appearance outside the “Update” desk since the premiere of Season 49 hosted by Pete Davidson.
Veronika Slowikowska 29:47 (5.3%)
Veronika Slowikowska leads her rookie class through the first nine episodes, thanks in part to her breakthrough episode hosted by Sabrina Carpenter in October, where she totaled nearly seven-and-a-half minutes. In that episode, she joined Domingo’s “Kelsquad” and dueted with Carpenter as a singing washer/dryer (marking her two longest career appearances).
Tommy Brennan 26:53 (4.8%)
Tommy Brennan began and ended his 2025 on SNL quietly, with less than a minute of screen time in his debut episode and just over a minute total in the episodes hosted by Josh O’Connor and Ariana Grande. With Episodes 2-7, however, Brennan had numbers similar to a fourth- or fifth-year cast member, averaging 04:08 per episode. He appeared as himself on “Weekend Update” in his third episode, and had his strongest night when Glen Powell hosted, earning four appearances over a minute each. (Among them was his country duet with Ben Marshall, “I Miss My Ex’s Dad.”) Brennan’s “Karaoke Night” with host Nikki Glaser was his second career 3+ minute appearance, and is still his longest to date.
Ben Marshall 25:55 (4.6%)
Known to SNL viewers for his video work with Please Don’t Destroy from Seasons 47-50, Ben Marshall has continued to succeed in the pretape portions of the show. He leads the men of the cast with 05:14 of screen time in pretapes (and is second overall, behind only Chloe Fineman). Marshall’s most notable live sketch appearances in his rookie season came in “Surprise” (02:02) with Sabrina Carpenter (led by Ashley Padilla), and playing a pair of sensitive strippers with host Josh O’Connor (01:54).
Jeremy Culhane 24:51 (4.4%)
Jeremy Culhane had the longest wait to have a breakthrough moment among the rookies, but has been on a steady trajectory ever since the final sketch of Nikki Glaser’s episode, “Make Believe Meadow,” where he and Mikey Day played stuffed animals obsessed with pinwheel!s. In the very next episode, hosted by Glen Powell, Culhane made a 02:42 appearance at the “Sebastian Maniscalco Bachelor Party.” Finally, he went toe-to-toe with six-time host Melissa McCarthy in the “Free Samples” sketch, his longest (03:41) appearance of the season.
Jane Wickline 23:25 (4.2%)
Jane Wickline remains the sole shutout of the cast this season (MIA in the premiere hosted by Bad Bunny), but she has had four 4+ minute episodes since. Wickline paired up with rookie Veronika Slowikowska in an original music video, “Cousin Planet,” that included host Melissa McCarthy. She also reprised her “Update” pairing with Marcello Hernández as “The Couple You Can’t Believe Are Together.” Her screen time average is up 8% from Season 50.
Kam Patterson 17:06 (3.0%)
Kam Patterson made the first big splash of the rookie class by introducing himself as the season’s first “Weekend Update” correspondent and leading (with 03:07) the class of five. After that strong start, though, he found himself at the bottom of the cast for five of the next seven episodes. Patterson finished strong by returning to “Update” in the final show of 2025, playing Michael Che’s 12-year-old nephew. He is now on pace to finish the season with 38 minutes of screen time.
