Druski’s turn as host of “Saturday Night Live” on Nov. 7 came with an audience attached, roughly 35 million followers across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube who know him from sketches he writes, shoots and posts himself.
The booking made him the first digital creator to host in the show’s 52 seasons. “SNL” has hired from the internet since Andy Samberg and the Lonely Island arrived in 2005, and both of this season’s new featured players, Grace Reiter and Saidah Belo-Osagie, came up making content. Quinta Brunson and Issa Rae started online too, but they hosted after crossover hits had already made them TV names.
A single Druski video can reach a third of the social views “SNL” collects from an entire episode. His March sketch “How Conservative Women in America Act” pulled more than 100 million views in two days.
Inde Navarrette’s Halloween episode, the season’s best performer, drew 325 million views across the show’s social accounts by the following Tuesday and 5.16 million viewers on NBC. Jalen Brunson, Dakota Johnson and Shane Gillis each landed between 4.37 million and 4.61 million.
Druski ran the night with the instincts of someone used to building his own content. His monologue listed the rules the show had handed him, including “no whiteface,” which he said he couldn’t promise to follow, and Emma Stone, his co-star in the upcoming baseball rom-com “The Catch,” walked on to back him up.
Michael B. Jordan and Austin Butler turned up for the goodnights. The rule-breaking came in “Dru Can See Everything,” a pre-taped parody of Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary in which Druski ends up playing Holmes himself.
Critics split hard. LateNighter gave the episode a D and called Druski “a lousy host,” while The A.V. Club called it “a classic middling-to-bad episode of SNL” with a host who was “almost immediately likable.” Pajiba named the Holmes parody its sketch of the week at 8.5 out of 10.
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Where the praise landed tracks how Druski works. Jezebel’s Margo Moran wrote that his live sketches and monologue “took some getting used to,” while the pre-taped material was where he thrived, and some of the harshest notices went to “Birthday Girl,” a live sketch with Druski in a wig as a woman furious over a friend’s sizzling fajitas. His online career runs on control over timing, camera angles and the edit, and a live sketch performed off cue cards takes all three away.
A TikTok of the monologue was reportedly shared 1.7 million times, and Travis Scott’s all-caps push for fans to tune in ended with “BREAK SNL STATION FOR ONCE. HE THE ONLY ONE WE GOT.” Scott’s “for once” is the clearest admission yet that much of Druski’s audience doesn’t normally watch the show.
Playing Holmes in whiteface revived the fight over his March video, which many viewers read as a send-up of Turning Point USA CEO Erika Kirk, who later criticized him for “dressing up in whiteface.” Druski has defended the character, telling “CBS Mornings,” “I never go and punch down.”
Nielsen numbers for the episode are due this week, usually along with NBC’s social-view totals, and the Halloween show’s 5.16 million viewers and 325 million clip views are the figures to beat. Matthew Belloni of Puck, who broke the booking, wrote that “If this goes well, I’d bet on the floodgates opening.” John Mulaney, hosting for the seventh time, follows on Nov. 14, which gives NBC a direct comparison between its newest kind of host and one of its most dependable.
