It's a complicated thing to launch a new live TV show in the current streaming economy. People aren't necessarily all that used to tuning in at a given time any more, which makes the catch-up game fairly massive, as Sky doubtless knew when it first commissioned and then extended a run of episodes for Saturday Night Live UK.
This is a major moment in UK TV – the first time in a while that I can remember an institution like this coming over from the US to be replicated the way UK comedy wants to do it. SNL has been an icon in the States, but there's no pretending it's always on top of the world, so to launch it in the UK is a bold move.
The first episode aired last weekend, though, and seems to have been received pretty well, with Tina Fey hosting and the usual array of sketches dropped through the show to keep the pace quick. Reviews have acknowledged that some were funnier than others, but the write-ups are largely positive.
Head to Sky's YouTube page, though, and you'll see an interesting battle playing out in the comments sections under the clips of the show that have been uploaded so far.
Sky is a paid-for TV service here in the UK, of course, and that means it hasn't made SNL as an act of charity – it wants to get subscribers out of this. It's therefore no surprise that the full episode isn't (and likely won't ever be) up on YouTube, but people under the uploads that have happened seem to uniformly have one request for Sky.
They want a dedicated SNL UK YouTube channel that they can subscribe to, to keep up with the clips that get uploaded throughout the rest of the show's first eight-episode season. As some are rightly pointing out, uploading these clips to the main Sky TV account makes it less appealing to subscribe, since you'll then get every ad and trailer Sky uploads to clog up your subscriptions page.
There are a couple of arguments being made on this front. Under a clip from the Weekend Update segment, one person commented: "Sky need to get an SNL UK channel set up to spread word of mouth". That might well be debated by Sky's marketing team in terms of its efficacy.
I'm more in agreement with another commenter under Tina Fey's monologue: "You really need to get a separate channel for these SNL UK clips. There are UK comedy fans who would subscribe to an SNL UK YouTube channel, but won’t subscribe to the main Sky channel because they don’t want to be inundated with other Sky videos."
Thousands of thumbs-up votes show it's a popular idea, and it'll be really interesting to see if Sky reacts at all. A quick rejig of its approach could make for YouTube gains, but I obviously have no insight into whether it'd prove fruitful in terms of actual on-platform viewership for the main show.
Still, a view count of well over two million on Fey's monologue suggests that the show's YouTube reach could be worth pursuing in and of itself, and for those of us who don't have Sky, it's certainly a fairly enticing tease of what the main show could offer.
