Here’s a news flash: “Lost” is a hit online. But so is CW’s “Privileged.”

For the first time, Nielsen Online has released rankings for online streaming of episodes and clips.
“Lost” tops the chart for the month of December with 1.4 million unique viewers, followed by NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” with 1.1 million.

By the yardstick of the total time viewers spent with a show online, the surprise leader in December was CW’s “Privileged.” The rating-challenged dramedy drew only 29,000 unique viewers, but those that did tune in stuck around for an average of 214.6 minutes.

There’s a big caveat to these rankings, however, in that they don’t include shows streamed via Hulu because Hulu won’t breakout its numbers to Nielsen (at least if I'm reading Nielsen-ese right. A Nielsen Online rep would only say that Hulu is "not available in our syndication service.")

Nielsen’s survey includes the websites of Hulu partners NBC and Fox, as well as ABC, CBS and CW. But by all accounts, Hulu's vid streaming traffic has outpaced that of the Peacock and Fox nets' individual websites. The survey captures clips that are embedded on other websites and blogs, as long as the streams come from the network's proprietary player (but not Hulu's player).

John McCain's appearance delivered another big number for "Saturday Night Live."

He wasn't quite as much of a draw as Sarah Palin two weeks ago, but still big -- a 9.0 household rating/20 share in Nielsen's 56 overnight metered markets, compared to Palin's 10.7/24. Palin's seg aside, it's "SNL's" highest number since a holiday compilation seg aired in December 1997.

There was a surreal quality to the cold open with McCain as McCain and Tina Fey as his running mate. You gotta give him credit for trying, but he just looks tired, and like his running mate two weeks ago, desperate. The bit even pokes fun at the rampant rumors of division within the McCain-Palin camp, with Fey/Palin's bid to sell "Palin in 2012" T-shirts on the sly.

Silly as it is, I got the biggest giggle out of the joke about "McCain Fine Gold."

And although it's been made clear in this space that I am a Keith Olbermann fan, I gotta admit that Ben Affleck, this week's "SNL" host, gets him to an indignant T in this seg spoofing his trademark anti-Bush rants on MSNBC's "Countdown with Keith Olbermann."

Who knew Don Draper had a sense of humor?

By all accounts, "Mad Men" star Jon Hamm did a swell job as host of "Saturday Night Live" last night, even if he sounded like he had a slight head cold. I'm not gonna name names but one "Mad Men" insider I spoke with recently described Hamm, very lovingly, as being a kind of "big 15-year-old" with a sense of humor to match. He flexed a lot of comedy chops last night and appeared to be having a good time.

Among the highlights of the "SNL" seg was this clip below, "Don Draper's Guide to Picking Up Women."

This skit featuring Hamm's "Mad Men" cohorts Elisabeth Moss and John Slattery probably could've been punchier, but Hamm saves it at the end with a spot-on spoof of the show's trademark Draper-closes-the-deal speeches.

Sunday update-update:

The ratings are in and they are gi-normous. (Good grief, don't let this be an omen for Nov. 4.) Sarah Palin's appearance pushed "Saturday Night Live" to its highest numbers in 14 years, since the show was hosted by another telegenic brunette thrust into the national spotlight, Olympic figure skater Nancy Kerrigan, on March 12, 1994.

"SNL" pulled a 10.7 rating/24 share in Nielsen's 56 overnight metered markets, which cover more than 70% of U.S. TV households. To put it in perspective, that number is 161% higher than the show's average last October, and 47% higher than last week's seg. It's lofty enough to make "SNL" the No. 3 program of last week, behind ABC's "Dancing With the Stars" and CBS' "CSI," on a household rating basis. (Final national viewer tally and demographic breakdown won't be available until Thursday.)

As I said below, Palin may not be bound for the Beltway next year but she will undoubtedly be in the market for a good TV agent come Nov. 5.

Sunday update:

OK. Gotta give Sarah Palin a few points for having a sense of humor, though I couldn't help but think "desperation time" while watching her two appearances on last night's "Saturday Night Live" (posted below), in the cold open and in the "Weekend Update" seg. Lorne Michaels (did Palin call him "Lauren"? -- it sure sounded like that to me) and Alec Baldwin played their parts perfectly (with a cool cameo from Mark Wahlberg to boot). Watching Palin and Fey pass each other was definitely worth the price of admission. And for the record, I would like to see the "30 Rock" sketch that Palin wrote. (Michaels flexed some self-depricating -deprecating muscle of his own in telling her "not enough people know that show.")

Can anyone explain why there's a life-size prop of a cow, or some other farm animal, in the background and Michaels and Palin are talking backstage? Is it part of a running gag, or maybe just a political commentary from "SNL's" prop master? After all, the hind end was pointed squarely at Palin.

If the polls keep going the way they're going, and the endorsements, a la Colin Powell's big news this ayem, keep going the Obama-Biden camp's way, I'm thinking Palin still gets her national platform -- a show on Fox News Channel or some other outlet. No matter what you think of her politics, you can't deny that the woman is telegenic, and she's already got her on-air signature -- her kitten-ish wink -- down pat.

Posted Saturday:

Sarah Palin's visit to "Saturday Night Live" tonight should make for a must-see vid clip, no matter what transpires.

The folks at Hulu are so charged up about the GOP veep nominee's potential to deliver the Super Bowl of viral vid (remember those debate ratings?) that on Friday they emailed out a "placeholder" link to the clip on their site. It should become real thing around 2 a.m. PST Sunday, after "SNL" airs on the West Coast.

Those Internet types, they think of everything.

There's lots of chatter on the web tonight about political comedy conspiracies and NBC's motivation for yanking a biting "Saturday Night Live" sketch from this past weekend that needles a few prominent liberal billionaires.

Los Angeles Times scribe Mary McNamara gets to the heart of the whole thing in an interview with "SNL" boss Lorne Michaels that was posted on the Times' Show Tracker blog Tuesday evening.

Michaels explains that the major issue with the sketch, which depicted a news conference to tubthump the plan held by Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank, was that he thought that two of the people portrayed in the sketch were fictional characters. In fact Herb and Marion Sandler are very real, and very rich from selling their subprime mortgage-pumping bank, Golden West Financial, to Wachovia for a cool $24 billion not so long ago.

Michaels told McNamara that he spoke to the Sandlers, and then made the call to pull the vid of the sketch off NBC.com, snip out some of the harshest (and probably legally actionable) comments out, and and then repost the kinder, gentler version.

Michaels sounds a little humbled by the experience. For the exec producer of "SNL," that's saying something.

First of all, I pleaded incompetence (when speaking to the Sandlers), which is not a thing I do often, and the fact that I did not know they were real is 100% my responsibility... I understand the Sandlers’ complaint. I think it’s not insignificant to read ‘People who should be shot’ underneath your name.

Michaels' comments are unlikely to quiet the conspiracy buffs who note that the Sandlers are big supporters of liberal causes, as is another public figure skewered in the sketch, George Soros.

Today's dust up over the sketch is likely to boost "SNL's" already soaring ratings. Why, it's almost as if the government, and the men and woman who would be our next prexy and veep, have staged their own bailout for this august American institution at the outset of its 34th season.

"You can't trust people who haven't walked through kitchens."

That was a vintage Bernie Brillstein-ism, according to his longtime friend and client Lorne Michaels. Michaels translates the Bernie bon mot to mean that talent needs to be honed through hard work and experience, and for comics, that often means the grueling biz of working nightclubs. And in many nightclubs, you have to walk through the kitchen to get to the stage.

Having spent most of the day talking to people about Brillstein (pictured with his wife, Carrie), who died Thursday at 77, I think I can safely say that the single-most defining aspect of his character was his "love of the game," as so many of his friends put it. He enjoyed the shoe-leather work of going to see a comic, or a play, or reading a spec script, or bumping into a promising staff writer on the set of a flailing TV show.

The latter scenario is how he met Michaels, 40 years ago on a Burbank soundstage that was briefly home to "The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show." The show was anything but beautiful, but it did mark the first U.S. job of a young Canuck scribe who was destined to meet his manager and mentor while working on that NBC show (and the two of them were destined to link arms and muscle "Saturday Night Live" on the air seven years later).

"The first night (on 'Beautiful') the taping went to 2:30 in the morning. We all spent a lot of time in the halls waiting around. And there was this guy Bernie who was both funny and profane and smart in a way that I'd never really experienced before," Michaels remembered.