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‘The Walking Dead’ has worst showing in many years
By DAVID BAUDER, AP Media Writer
NEW YORK (AP) — It wasn’t so long ago that zombies, and “ e Walking Dead,” were all the rage. is week’s ratings show how that’s faded.
e 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 demo- graphic, it was the worst showing since 2010.
“ e Walking Dead” this week com- peted directly against the Oscars, which themselves had a record low viewership. e rst night ratings are also hurt by the same factors a ecting television in general; viewers are increasingly nding di er-
ent ways to watch. For example, in 2014 AMC found that three-quarters of viewers watched the show on live TV or on DVRs. ree years later, that number was down to
55 percent, 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 measure- ment.
“ e 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.
Meanwhile, the Academy Awards have their own issues to talk about. It was the rst time that the Oscars, seen Sunday
by 26.5 million people, had ever had an audience smaller than 30 million. e relative unpopularity of the movies being honored surely had an impact. Conser- vative commentators claim that political
messages from Hollywood gures made a di erence, too.
ABC won the week in prime time behind the Oscars, averaging 7.6 million viewers. CBS had 6.8 million, NBC had 5.1 million, Fox had 2.8 million, Univision had 1.8 million, ION Television had 1.4 million, the CW had 1.2 million and Tele- mundo had 1.1 million.
Fox News Channel was the week’s most popular cable network, averaging 2.24 million viewers in prime time. MSNBC had 1.82 million, HGTV had 1.42 million, ESPN had 1.39 million and USA had 1.31 million.
ABC’s “World News Tonight” topped the evening newscasts with an average of 9.1 million viewers. NBC’s “Nightly News” was second with 8.7 million and the “CBS Evening News” had 6.7 million.
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