This won’t be news to anyone who has a Twitter feed, but according to Variety a quite substantial 23.1 million people tuned in to watch Eddie Murphy throw to commercial on SNL 40 last night. That’s the largest number of viewers for a NBC primetime telecast since the Frasier finale in 2004, and only 1.7 million shy of the 24.8 million who watched Kanye West’s last round of televised antics at the Grammys last week. Variety does note that the numbers may come down a bit once adjusted to include the show’s final half hour, because even for Saturday Night Live three and a half hours is a long time.
But for all the people for whom three hours of celebrity self-congratulation was enough for one lifetime, there were probably more people who had stopped paying attention to the telecast but left it on in the background while they looked at their phones. The Wrap reports that SNL 40 set a new Twitter record with 1.3 million tweets seen by a total of 9.1 million people, the largest unique audience for any series episode so far in the 2014-2015 TV season. Somehow that math comes out to those tweets being seen 188 million times, the highest number of Twitter TV impressions for any series episode ever. (That’s in contrast to special events like the Super Bowl.) Of those 1.3 million tweets, 1 million were—or at least should have been—about how great Bill Murray’s “Love Theme From Jaws” was.