Does Anyone Still Watch Saturday Night Live?

I have noticed--and been surprised to notice--Saturday Night Live consistently listed under "trending" searches on a certain search engine.

After all, Saturday Night Live's place in popular culture is not what it used to be. Yes, actors promoting some new movie will still customarily stop here in the course of their publicity tour, but all the same, "network," "linear" TV has seen its profile and audience decline markedly amid the ascent of cable, home video and more lately streaming, and according to the ratings and other evidence I have seen the show is no exception. Indeed, it seems telling that it has been a long time since Hollywood tried making a feature film out of any of the show's sketches. The last seems to have been MacGruber way back in 2010, which, perhaps tellingly, flopped and left very little cultural trace, even as compared with not just a classic like The Blues Brothers, but A Night at the Roxbury or The Ladies Man. (Whatever else one says about them, many hearing the song "What is Love?" will think of the Butabi brothers, and maybe Jim Carrey, rather than Haddaway--while going by what I see online The Ladies Man may be one of the more highly quoted films of its time.)

Perhaps also telling, the MacGruber character, in playing off of a show that went off the air almost two decades earlier (as Murdoc yelled so many times, "MacGyver!"), seems to have already been playing to an audience other than the 18-30s who were supposed to be the original target demographic. (According to the numbers published a few years ago, almost 80 percent of the audience was above the age of 29, and 34 percent of the audience over 55.) Still, it is also an older audience that rather than plugging into some social media site on their phone "surfs the web" very much these days, and therefore accounts disproportionately for search traffic, such that in spite of the show's playing to a dwindling and aging crowd as the young appear increasingly oblivious to its existence there it is in "What's trending," even if, we are told, the producers' effort to reach the younger crowd notwithstanding.