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how long is saturday night live

Saturday Night Live (SNL) runs about 90 minutes in its original live broadcast, scheduled in a roughly 93‑minute TV slot from about 11:30 p.m. to 1:02 a.m. Eastern Time.

Quick Scoop: How long is Saturday Night Live?

If you’re asking “how long is Saturday Night Live?” in practical, couch‑watching terms:

  • A regular new SNL episode is about 1.5 hours long, including commercials.
  • NBC schedules it for roughly 93 minutes total (11:29:30 p.m. to 1:02 a.m. Eastern).
  • Within that, the actual comedy + music content is somewhat less once you subtract ad breaks.

Reruns on other channels or streaming can be shorter (often cut to around an hour) because sketches or one musical performance may be removed to fit different time slots and reduce ad load.

Mini Breakdown of the 90 minutes

A typical live episode usually fits this rough flow:

  1. Cold open and iconic “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!”
  2. Host’s monologue.
  3. Several sketches and sometimes a fake commercial.
  4. Weekend Update segment in the middle.
  5. Musical guest performs, usually twice.
  6. More sketches toward the end, then goodnights.

All of that is what fills the roughly 90‑minute block viewers know as Saturday Night Live.

So if you’re planning your night: expect about an hour and a half for a normal live SNL episode, slightly less actual show time and the rest commercials.

TL;DR: Saturday Night Live is about 90 minutes long live on NBC, in a ~93‑minute time slot; reruns elsewhere are often trimmed to about an hour.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.