Do actors from the Daily Show or Saturday Night Live produce make better movies and tb shows? To answer this question, rotten tomatoe movie reviews were used to assess the quality of movies starrring actors for each show Using Wikipedia's list of actors that appeared on either show we found that up until 2015 these two shows have collectively included 183 actors, 141 on SNL and 46 on the Daily Show. Four Actors (A. Whitney Brown, Michael Che, Rob Riggle, and Nancy Walls) appeared on both shows.
According to IMDB there were 8,358 unique movies and 2,460 unique TV Shows between all 183 actors,though some of these are movies and TV shows that as of 2015 were in production or not yet released.
To rank these movies and TV shows, Rotten Tomatoes' Audience Score for every movie and TV Show was obtained, except for those movies and shows that had SNL, Saturdayl Night Live or Daily Show in the title). This reduced our list of movies and TV shows to 5,863 movies and 138 TV shows. The Rotten Tomatoes audience scores were used to calcualte the mean for each actor.
To determine if the length of time an actor spends on either show helps their career, we made a scatterplot of the data
Interestingly, the highest three points (all above 75) are Emily Prager (for the show Hawk), Vance DeGeneres (due to his work on the Ellen Show), and Bob Wiltfong. Unfortunately the point way at the bottom, is the new Daily Show host Trevor Noah and represents the appearance as himself on the show “Would I Lie to You?”. The points far out to the right on the graph that’s Jon Stewart (17 years) and Lewis Black (21) who is part of the current season of the Daily Show. Statistical Analysis (and visual observation) suggests that the number of years on the show doesn’t effect your Rotten Tomatoes score.
We can also see that the shows consistently produce talent of equal caliber. T hus if given an opportunity to be on the Daily Show or SNL the outcome for your career will be the same.
We also looked at each show by cast for each year to see if there were years when they were lacking in star power. As you can see from the figures below, both shows consistently had quality stars for every year they’ve been on the air. Overall: A pretty solid tie between the two shows