‘The Walking Dead’ Season 8 Ratings Are Getting More Scary

While still retaining its status as the most popular scripted drama on basic cable, The Walking Dead Season 8 ratings presumably are causing concern in the AMC executive suite, especially after the season opener hit a five-year low in viewership and Week 2 was down 20 percent from there. In Week 3, The Walking Dead was down five percent from the prior week.

The Season 8 premiere garnered 11.4 million viewers as compared to the Season 7 counterpart’s 17 million.

According to Variety and other entertainment outlets, last week’s Episode 5 entitled “The Big Scary U,” was the lowest-rated episode in the zombie apocalypse series since the “Secrets’ episode (Week 4) that aired on November 20, 2011, suggesting that ratings are themselves getting more scary, as it were.

“Episode 5 of Season 8 drew a 3.4 rating in adults 18-49 and 7.8 million viewers. That is a drop off approximately 10 percent in both measures from Episode 4…This is the latest instance this season of the number one show on television drawing Season 2 numbers.”

Over the years and seasons, fans and former fans have consumed an enormous amount of social media bandwidth discussing the issues with the TWD storyline, particularly its often slow pace when nothing much happens to advance the narrative. In contrast, Season 8 has been action packed, thus making the audience erosion something of a surprise perhaps. “The Big Scary U” was one of the better installments, with a three-pronged plot: Negan and Father Gabriel stuck in the railroad car surrounded by zombies, a flashback to Negan’s intense staff meeting before the attack started, and Rick and Daryl doing whatever they’re doing.

Week 4 was also rather compelling, with King Ezekiel and Jerry seemingly headed to a higher kingdom as a result of a zombie swarm attack before Carol came to their rescue. It also depicted the demise of Shiva. Parenthetically, the episode featured a lot of poor marksmanship in the rapid-fire Savior shootouts while hardly anyone stops to reload (tropes that seem to reoccur in potboilers of this nature), plus — in the alternative — some miraculous gunplay accuracy by Carol.

The rinse-and-repeat cycle of finding and then losing a safe haven as a result of the combined actions of villainous humans (i.e., Negan, The Governor, etc.) and zombies is also an issue for many fans. Among other things, the repetitive moralizing, a.k.a. navel gazing, about zombie apocalypse ethics by the main characters as they ping-pong from warrior to pacifist and back to warrior has also been much discussed. Bad decision-making by the good guys, and lapses of logic in the storytelling, have also been part of the mix. It’s also difficult for viewers to experience an emotional reaction to the annihilation of the Kingdom soldiers, for example, when most of them have been just non-speaking extras on the periphery of the action.

Despite all the hype surrounding the Negan character, moreover, it seems like Jeffrey Dean Morgan might be paradoxically both overused and underused on The Walking Dead, depending on the context.

“The Walking Dead still has a long way to drop before there’s serious talk of cancellation occurring… The steady drop does suggest that the show’s lifetime is not quite as secure as everyone assumed,” the ScreenRant website noted.

It remains to be seen if The Walking Dead ratings will bounce back with tonight’s chapter “The King, The Widow, and Rick.” Going in its favor, the series typically seems stronger with multiple storylines and multiple regular characters appearing in the same episode rather than so-called “bottle” episodes focusing on just one or two of the survivors.

“The Walking Dead remains the top-rated show on television, currently averaging a 4.0 and 9.1 million viewers this season,” Variety added.

The Walking Dead midseason finale, an extended 88-minute episode, is scheduled for December 10.

[Featured Image by Gene Page/AMC]