It wasn’t so long ago that zombies, and The Walking Dead, were all the rage. This week’s ratings show how that’s faded.
The latest episode of the AMC series was seen by 6.82 million viewers on Sunday, the drama’s smallest audience since 2012. For the youthful 18-to-49-year-old demographic, it was the worst showing since 2010.
The Walking Dead this week competed directly against the Oscars, which themselves had a record low viewership. The first night ratings are also hurt by the same factors affecting television in general” viewers are increasingly finding different ways to watch. For example, in 2014 AMC found that three-quarters of viewers watched the show on live TV or on DVRs. Three years later, that number was down to 55 per cent, with the rest watching streams online or through devices like Roku or Apple TV, and those people don’t appear in the Nielsen company’s weekly measurement.
The Walking Dead is still television’s most popular drama among young viewers for the sixth season in a row, and no other drama has ever done that for more than four, AMC said.
Still, it’s hard to deny that the numbers illustrate a marked decline in the show’s decline in popularity.
