Gary Levin

USA TODAY

NBC's Saturday Night Live, a pop-culture arbiter of the tumultuous election season, is off to its biggest ratings start since 1994, thanks in part to a Trump bump.

SNL is averaging 10.6 million viewers for its first 12 shows this season, counting delayed viewing, up a big 22% from last season's first 11 shows. Saturday's Alec Baldwin-hosted episode scored 10.8 million same-day viewers, the show's biggest audience in six years, according to preliminary Nielsen estimates from top markets.

SNL isn't the only show reaping political rewards.

TBS' Full Frontal With Samantha Bee set a ratings record among young adults for last week's episode; the show is up 50% since the election season began, compared to its performance last winter and spring. And CBS' Late Show With Stephen Colbert beat NBC's Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon for a second straight week, ending Feb. 10, widening its lead to 134,000 viewers. It marks Colbert's first wins since his premiere in September 2015.

While TV ratings slip nearly across the board, late-night comedy with a Washington bent is gaining — or at least losing less ground than rivals — a function of the public's insatiable thirst for cathartic presidential satire that has drawn the ire of the actual president on Twitter.

SNL has long been the biggest late-night draw, and fills a special role as the arbiter of mockery with Baldwin's impersonation of Trump, and Melissa McCarthy reprised her spot-on take Saturday of White House press secretary Sean Spicer, aka "Spicey." Kate McKinnon's Kellyanne Conway also returned, channeling Glenn Close's vengeful Fatal Attraction character as she vied for the attention of Beck Bennett's Jake Tapper.

Still, not all late-night talk shows are sharing in the political spoils.

Colbert is up 6% over last year, and for the season, he's averaging 2.9 million viewers, down just 1% from the same period a year earlier, but Fallon — who mostly avoids political humor — is off 13%. ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live fell 7%, to 2.3 million.

During the same stretch, Fallon's Trump-bashing companion, NBC's Late Night with Seth Meyers is down just 3%, averaging 1.6 million viewers, though CBS' Late Late Show With James Corden rose 7%, to 1.4 million. Comedy Central's The Daily Show, which struggled after Jon Stewart's departure, has also regained its footing during the election season, climbing 7% to 1.3 million. HBO's Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, which returned Sunday for a fourth season, counts last year's third as its highest-rated yet.

The left-leaning hosts say they'd rather not focus on presidential politics: "I don't want to spend any time on him," Bee says. "But that's the world we're living in, and it's hard to look at other stories. It's so important and it's so in our faces right now, we just have to," she says. "People are turning to our show for something of a catharsis; that's all we're trying to do for ourselves."

But Oliver last week said he hopes the proportion of presidential material will diminish: "I'm very anxious to not make it all Trump all the time, just on the level of interest and what the human soul can sustain."

"No one marked 2017 as the year I want more political humor in my life," says Meyers' executive producer Mike Shoemaker, also an SNL veteran, via email.

"But whenever we plan for something light it gets overtaken. First there's a tweet, then an executive order, a march, an explosive press briefing, a fight on CNN, more tweets. We can't ignore it. And viewers can't seem to ignore it even if they want to ... And whether you're conservative or liberal, you've never seen a President like this before, and I think everyone just wants to make sense of it all."