Arts & Entertainment
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12/02/2013 @ 5:58PM |21,209 views
'The Walking Dead' Ratings Disappoint, Just A Little
It says something about the quality of a franchise, when a ratings performance like the one for Sunday night’s mid-season finale for The Walking Dead can be considered a mild disappointment. The show drew 12.1 million viewers and 7.7 million adults in the critical 18-49 age group.
Those numbers are impressive by any standards. Except the show’s own. The Season Four premiere drew a staggering 16.1 million viewers and 10.1 million in the 18-49 demo. Indeed, the Season Four Finale, despite a much hyped confrontation that resulted in the deaths of at least two important characters, Episode 408 trailed the average season four episode–13.0 million total viewers/8.4 in 18/49–by a bit.
The timing of the episode on a holiday weekend, coupled with strong opposition from NFL and network sweeps programming, may have dampened the mid-season finale ratings, which don’t include time shifted viewing on DVR, On Demand and repeat airings.
The ratings for the Season 3 mid-season finale (6.0 total/ 3.8 18-49) were significantly lower than the Season 4 numbers, although they did represent an increase over the average for the first eight episodes (4.5 total/3.0 18-49) which wasn’t the case in Season 4.
A number of those viewers have been sharing their enthusiasm on their smart phones. According to Nielsen SocialGuide, The Walking Dead was the top TV show on Twitter yesterday with 880,450 show-related Tweets from 391,210 unique authors, generating a total of 43.9 million impressions. TWD Twitter activity peaked at 9:48 p.m. EST with 31,861 Tweets-per-minute, representing 83 percent of all television-related Twitter activity at that time.
The Walking Dead is the highest rated show in the history of cable, and the number one show in all of television in the 18-49 demographic.
An even more unlikely–and economical–hit for AMC has been The Talking Dead, a TWD themed talk show hosted by Chris Hardwick. This week it set a record with a 6 million total viewers and 3.8 million in 18-49. Over the first eight episodes, it’s posted a solid average of 4.5 million total viewers with 3.o million in the coveted 18-49. That’s represents an increase of 128% and 120% over last year’s numbers.
What’s your reaction to the ratings success of The Walking Dead? Share your opinions and predictions in the comments.
And return to my page later this week for a discussion about why The Walking Dead is so popular.
Please follow me on Twitter (@avincent52) or follow me on Forbes.
Allen St. John is the author of Newton’s Football: The Science Behind America’s Game, published this month by Ballantine Books.
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You may be a highly successful writer but you need to get Forbes to hire me to proofread your stuff since apparently it’s cool to pluralize nouns with apostrophes.
“Indeed, the Season Four Finale, despite a much hyped confrontation that resulted in the death’s of at least two…”
Brutal. On a more relevant note, I enjoy The Walking Dead very much and I’m looking forward to its (not it’s) return in February.
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One of the ways we get things up so quickly is because, well, we don’t have a team of copy editors and proofreaders. And as you know, it’s pretty hard to proofread your own stuff. Your brain just fills in what it thinks it *should* see. It’s neuroscience. Thanks for weighing in. And catching the stray apostrophe that I’ve since caught.
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After 23 years of teaching composition at the college level, let me tell you something: the neuroscience bit is a COP-OUT the average college freshman uses to excuse being too lazy to do his editing. It takes less than a minute longer to have typed your entry into a word processing program, run a grammar check, and then copy it into your blog.
For someone supposedly representing one of the more “reputable” magazines in the country–Forbes–you’d think you’d know to take that extra step.
As for TWD ratings drop . . . I’d look to the fact the previous two episodes–both focusing just on the Governor, not the “heroes”–did not seem to resonate very well with the regular posters on the “sync” that AMC runs during the premiere of a show. Furthermore, the response to the death of the character Hershel was extremely negative this week. If this hadn’t been the mid-term finale, you’d probably find the ratings dropping again next week. Kirkman and crew should probably hope the animosity lessens before they roll out the series continuation in February.
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I saw that. You were on the ball.
You’re spot on about the difficulty when it comes to catching one’s own errors. You’ll have to pardon my cynicism. It’s a product of seeing so many people who fail to command the written word.
Thanks for the interesting read.
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Remember that scene in Annie Hall, where Alvie Singer pulls Marshall McLuhan from behind the sign in the movie line? I’ve interviewed actual neuroscientists–guys with Nobel Prizes–who can vouch for me on this. And you and I both know that the grammar check on a word processor is going to be wrong more often than it’s right.
As to your real point, I do think that you may have a point about The Governor story line, although the fact that the episode aired on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, which is traditionally a travel day, also had something to do with it. How did the reaction to Hershel’s death compare to Lori’s or Andrea’s or Dale’s?
I really don’t expect much of a carry-over effect in February but I guess we’ll see, won’t we? -
I try my best to catch my mistakes, but I also have the ability to fix them once a story’s been posted.
I’m used to writing for places where I’d work with a small army of editors, proofreaders, and factcheckers, but I tried never to rely on them too much and produce copy that was “camera ready.” That’s an old newspaper joke, BTW.
Glad you liked the piece, and I’m always happy to have someone backstop me, but he pay isn’t very good. -
It was certainly a shocker beheading one of the main characters but I’m just glad we’re finally moving on from the Prison. The show needs more variety in it’s settings- the prison was the new farm from Season 2. Keep your appetite for zombies full until the 2nd half of this season with some zombie art and the Top 10 Zombie Movies of All Time at http://dregstudiosart.blogspot.com/2011/05/top-10-zombie-movies-of-all-time-with.html
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Nothing like a good be-heading, Brandt. Maybe I’ve seen Kill Bill once too often.
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It is a sad statement on “social media” that the most intelligent response to your question: “What’s your reaction to the ratings success of The Walking Dead? Share your opinions and predictions in the comments.” is a critique on your punctuation. Apparently some people never make mistakes. As a physics major I could give a rats butt about punctuation’s.
More directly, I think that the ratings are going to rebound, at least more towards the 14M mark thru the second half of season 4. Having read all of the comics, this show is only going to get darker and meaner. A rapid montage of scenes from the second half were shown and I was able to place several of them and all I can say is that, “now it gets really ugly.”
That, more than any other factor will determine the future of the ratings. Are the Glenn Mazzaras of the world right, and the viewers are not ready for “that!” ? Or are the Kirkmans and Gimples right, and we hunger for something deeper than fake reality shows.
I leave it to you all to proof.
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“And return to my page later this week for a discussion about why The Walking Dead is so popular.”
I hope you give this discussion deeper thought than other writers and psychologists. It is an incredibly complex topic and the stereotype does not apply.
I’ll await your next installment to comment