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BTS blows away SNL, and you can watch their performance online

The South Korean band also smashed a YouTube record for views of its new single.

Gael Cooper
CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line.
Expertise Breaking news, entertainment, lifestyle, travel, food, shopping and deals, product reviews, money and finance, video games, pets, history, books, technology history, generational studies. Credentials
  • Co-author of two Gen X pop-culture encyclopedia for Penguin Books. Won "Headline Writer of the Year"​ award for 2017, 2014 and 2013 from the American Copy Editors Society. Won first place in headline writing from the 2013 Society for Features Journalism.
Gael Cooper

You can usually get a good sense of which Saturday Night Live skits scored high with fans by watching their viewership numbers on YouTube , where the show posts them to its official channel once they air.

This week, the comedy skits, starring host Emma Stone, are likely to come in second to the musical performances by BTS, the first South Korean musical act to perform on the NBC show.

Global sensation BTS performed its new single Boy With Luv, and just 30 minutes after SNL posted the video of the performance, it had been viewed more than 100,000 times on YouTube.

That's nothing though in BTS terms. The band released the official video for Boy With Luv on Friday, and it's already had more than 109 million views. YouTube didn't immediately respond to a request for comment, but according to Variety, the video smashed the site's record for most views in the first 24 hours of release. There were also more than 2.5 million comments left on the video.

BTS also performed its 2017 hit Mic Drop, and when SNL posted that video, it, too, piled up the views, topping 73,000 in just 30 minutes.

In previews for the show released earlier, cast member Cecily Strong and Emma Stone freaked out just standing on stage with the band.

The band even was mentioned in a sketch. On Weekend Update, Colin Jost joked that President Donald Trump was "more obsessed with WikiLeaks than this audience is with BTS."