Editor’s note: Mike Murray hosts The Saturday Night Network’s weekly By the Numbers podcast. Click the embed at the top of this post to watch it live Wednesday night at 8 p.m. ET / 5 p.m. PT, or catch the replay afterward.
Fresh off her Academy Award nomination for her role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (and recent Golden Globe win for same), Teyana Taylor took the 8H stage in SNL’s 999th episode. See how she and musical guest, Geese, stacked up against the cast.
Note: Our screen time calculation method prioritizes face time, meaning that any contiguous off-screen-but-in-scene moments and most partial-body appearances do not count. Screen time in the opening credits, bumpers, goodnights, and cut-for-time sketches is not included, nor do those portions factor into our assessment of the episode’s total running time.
Teyana Taylor – 15:28 (24.3%)
Taylor received the news of her Oscar nomination the way she always envisioned, “getting fitted for a bald cap next to Mikey Day.” She commanded the stage with her dance moves in said bald cap as an elderly grandfather in a wedding sketch, but finished the night with the lowest host screen time in 30 episodes (since Jean Smart’s 12:18 in the Season 50 premiere). After a short 3-1/2 minute monologue, she tag-teamed the night’s first sketch, “Gate Agents,” with 23-year vet Kenan Thompson. Her night was subsequently filled with mostly supporting roles, averaging under 90 seconds per segment. (Timothée Chalamet, a fellow nominee at this year’s Oscars,, had even lower screen time when he first hosted, and has returned twice since.)
James Austin Johnson – 09:39 (15.2%)
Johnson led the cast for the second straight week. He opened the show as Donald Trump hosting his own awards show, and this coming Saturday could bring his 50th Trump impression. This week was his sixth-highest career screen time, contributing the voice over in the “One Battle After Another” action figures pre-tape, playing a drunk pilot in “Gate Agents,” reprising his Joe Buck impression (from his first-ever episode), and RSVPing to the wedding attended by Taylor’s Grandpa Jackson. He has surpassed Andrew Dismukes in screen time this season, and is inching closer to Chloe Fineman.
Kenan Thompson – 09:19 (14.6%)
Thompson hit the nine-minute mark for the 20th time in the past eight years, pulling together four live sketch appearances of at least a minute each. His biggest role of the night came in the post-monologue sketch, playing a singing airline gate agent with Taylor (his third-longest appearance of the season). He has now improved his Season 50 average, halting a slow but steady screen time decline since Season 48.
Geese – 08:33 (13.4%)
Geese, a band out of Brooklyn, made their SNL debut performing “Au Pays du Cocaine” and “Trinidad” off their September album, Getting Killed. Although Johnson portrayed lead singer Cameron Winter earlier this season, the musical guest sketch appearance streak was broken after three episodes (Lily Allen, Cher, and A$AP Rocky).
Colin Jost – 07:01 (11.0%)
Despite not making an appearance outside “Weekend Update,” Jost posted an impressive screen time due to leading both guest segments (Marcello Hernández’ &’s Gen Z translator and Jeremy Culhane’s “Mr. On Blast”). Jost extended his “Update” anchor record to 240 episodes; he would have hit 250 with this season’s finale had it not been for Paul Rudd’s Omicron-impacted Christmas episode of Season 47.
Ashley Padilla – 06:55 (10.9%)
Padilla rose back to prominence after two quieter weeks (that were still high for any featured player). She had her seventh six-appearance night, highlighted by “Confidence Class,” in which she played a seminarist who quickly loses the respect of her students. Per the Saturday Night Network, Padilla has now made history with a streak of 10 consecutive episodes with three appearances as a featured player—a record held by Heidi Garder with 17. With nine episodes remaining, breaking that record looks to be in reach.
Mikey Day – 06:08 (9.6%)
For the seventh time in SNL‘s past 50 outings, Day made six appearances in a single episode. His longest this week came as the DJ in “Grandpa at the Wedding.” He had a steady workload all night, only missing a single live sketch and playing the concerned parents (alongside Padilla) in the “One Battle After Another” toy commercial.
Andrew Dismukes – 05:37 (8.8%)
After breaking his nine-episode streak of four-plus-minute episodes with Finn Wolfhard, Dismukes returned to his season average. He debuted two new impressions, pairing with JAJ’s Joe Buck as Troy Aikman in “NFL on ESPN,” and channeling Stephen Miller in the Cold Open. If he can log 06:10 of screen time next week, he’ll hit seven hours of career screen time.
Marcello Hernández – 05:21 (8.4%)
Hernández made his cast-leading fourth guest appearance on “Weekend Update,” where he took the opportunity to introduce (and immediately retire) Gen-Z slang with Jost. Hernández appeared as Argentinian president Javier Milei in the Cold Open and made three small live-sketch appearances to string back-to-back five-appearance episodes for the first time in his 69-episode SNL career.
Jeremy Culhane – 04:55 (7.7%)
Culhane reprised the impression of JD Vance he debuted last week following the departure of Bowen Yang, but this week’s headline is his first drop-in on “Update,” where heintroduced an original character, “Mr. On Blast” (his second-longest appearance of the season). As did fellow rookies Kam Patterson, Tommy Brennan, and Ben Marshall, Culhane interacted with Jost in his own “Update” debut. He also had a role as Sarah Sherman’s Southern father in Martin Herlihy’s “Blowing It” short.
Chloe Fineman – 04:39 (7.3%)
Fineman became the second cast member to pass the 50-appearance mark this week, making five. Her longest appearance came in the final live sketch, “Beyond the Headlines,” playing a panelist struggling to get her point across. She is one of only three cast members (along with fellow vets Thompson and Day) to make a live appearance on “Weekend Update.”
Michael Che – 03:18 (5.2%)
The fifth-longest tenured SNL cast member of all-time, Michael Che has now gone 50 consecutive episodes without a non-“Update” appearance. After leading both guest segments on his side of the desk in the Ariana Grande and Finn Wolfhard episodes, he stuck to just the jokes this week, grabbing headlines for his lead-off dig at ICE.
Kam Patterson – 02:52 (4.5%)
Though still at the bottom of the cast screen time leaderboard, Patterson has enjoyed redemption over the past three episodes ,bringing his average up from 01:30 to 02:03. He made three appearances post-“Update” this week, most notably as the groom in “Grandpa at the Wedding.” (The cut-at-dress “Mom’s Camera Roll” surely would have helped his numbers.) He is just under the pace Michael Longfellow was on in his own rookie year (Season 48).
Sarah Sherman – 02:50 (4.5%)
Sherman at the midpoint has been the biggest question mark of Season 51. After a 25-episode run averaging nearly seven minutes per episode (similar to Kate McKinnon’s final run), Sherman has now averaged under two minutes over the previous three episodes. Her notable appearances were in the Cold Open as “Aunt Gladys from Weapons” and in Martin Herlihy’s short film, playing his girlfriend. (Fans clamoring for the return of her “Sarah Squirm”-style can watch her cut piece, “The Incident.”)
Martin Herlihy – 02:45 (4.3%)
Herlihy (known from Please Don’t Destroy in Seasons 47-50) had his second short film of the season air in the last slot of the night. “Blowing It” showed Herlihy’s comedic style in full force, providing romantic advice on how to get your partner to break up with you. (His first short aired during Sabrina Carpenter’s episode.) This was his 39th episode, and career-high screen time.
Veronika Slowikowska – 01:19 (2.1%)
Slowikowska had a quiet week following a 04:40 episode with Finn Wolfhard. She got to show off more of her vocal chops as Carrie Underwood in the Cold Open, and made a silent appearance in the ad for the fictional Hulu series Quefs in “NFL on ESPN.” She has yet to make less than two appearances in any episode of her rookie season.
Tommy Brennan – 01:03 (1.7%)
Brennan’s cold streak continued for a fourth episode, now averaging just 41 seconds since Melissa McCarthy hosted in early December. He had two appearances, as Denver Broncos’ quarterback Jarrett Stidham in “NFL on ESPN” and “the construction worker from the Village People” in the Cold Open. His sharp statistical drop is due in no small part to having segments he led cut for the live show. Last week it was his commentary on ICE in Minneapolis on “Update,” this week the pretape song “Mom’s Camera Roll.”
Mike Myers – 00:58 (1.5%)
Myers returned to SNL for the first time since the Season 50 finale (which saw him playing himself stuck in an elevator with Kenan Thompson’s Kanye West). This week, he reprised his impression of Elon Musk in the Cold Open and delivered the iconic line “Live from New York!” for the 19th time—and almost exactly 37 years since he made his SNL debut in the middle of Season 14.
Jane Wickline – 00:44 (1.2%)
Following her best four-episode run of her SNL career, Wickline had her sixth-lowest screen time through her 31 episodes so far. She had an 18-second pre-taped appearance in the lower third of the “NFL on ESPN” sketch, and was a cast member on “Backstab Island” later in the night.
Ben Marshall – 00:03 (0.1%)
Marshall pitched a career low with a silent, single, blink-and-you-miss it appearance as Loki in the Cold Open. He made his cast debut with 12 seconds in Bad Bunny’s season-premiere episode, but averaged 03:21 in between.
Get stories like this in your inbox: Sign up for LateNighter’s free daily newsletter.
