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American SNL will still come first, though.
Photo: Sky
Good news for U.S. comedy nerds: You won’t have to wait quite as long to stream this weekend’s episode of Saturday Night Live UK on Peacock. Stateside viewers weren’t able to watch the full episode of the Sky TV show here until 9 p.m. ET Sunday, but Vulture has learned that, starting this weekend, Peacock plans to start posting episodes eight hours earlier, at 1 p.m. ET/10 a.m. PT. SNL obsessives were no doubt a tad annoyed that it took a full day to see the premiere on Peacock — or even for the streamer to even confirm when on Sunday the show would actually air — but it turns out the streamer had its reasons for the delay.
To be clear, Peacock (which, like Sky, is part of Comcast) hardly ignored SNL UK prior to its launch. It issued an appropriately excited press release on March 9 noting it had landed U.S. streaming rights to the Lorne Michaels–produced program, even including a celebratory quote from NBCUniversal Entertainment chief business officer Liz Jenkins calling the show “a natural extension” of SNL’s comic legacy here. So far, so good. But in that same release, Peacock also revealed that rather than airing the show live here — as it does with the U.S. SNL or the NBA or the Olympics — American audiences would have to wait until the next day to stream it. Peacock also didn’t specify exactly when on Sundays viewers would be able to watch. Even when the crew at LateNighter pressed for specifics the day before SNL UK bowed, Peacock remained mum on the premiere time. It wasn’t until late Sunday afternoon that the streamer finally confirmed the show would post at 9 p.m. ET that evening, which it did without incident.
So why the uncertainty about the U.S. rollout of SNL UK on Peacock? Per an NBCU source, the decision to not livestream the show Saturday evening was made in order to prevent any potential conflict or confusion with the American SNL. Even though the latter series was in reruns last weekend, in coming weeks, the two shows will produce new episodes the same evening, and NBCU execs wanted to make sure NBC’s SNL — which does stream live on Peacock — is the first SNL American audiences see every week, a person familiar with the decision said. (Such parochialism isn’t limited to the U.S.: In the U.K., Sky Comedy viewers don’t see the American show until early Monday morning.)
As for why it took so long to confirm an exact Sunday debut time for SNL UK, our source says that because this was the first episode of a brand-new live show, Peacock wanted to allow for a buffer in case there were any opening-night production glitches with the show on the U.K. side or any issues here with ingesting SNL UK into the Peacock platform. So rather than offer up a specific premiere time too far in advance, Peacock waited until it knew the show would be able to stream at 9 p.m. ET before confirming that time to the press. But now that those first-episode uncertainties are in the past, Peacock programmers have decided it’s safe to establish the earlier 1 p.m. ET post time. As Mr. Wayne Campbell might say: excellent!
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