The good news about Sunday night’s Fear the Walking Dead is that it was still the second highest-rated show of the night, behind only the return of Sunday Night Football. The bad news? Fear‘s ratings are slipping fast.
The third of six season one episodes was seen by 7.2 million live viewers. That’s a good number. The bad news is, it’s down 12 percent from the second episode, which itself was down 19 percent from the first episode. In fact, the 7.2 million wasn’t that much better than the 6.95 million who watched the Miss America pageant.
Granted, these are overnight numbers, and with stiff competition from the NFL, they’re likely to grow on DVR (recent episodes have seen a 50 percent uptick once DVR viewership is accounted for). However, Fear was trounced by Sunday Night Football, which was seen by 26 million people, while The Walking Dead regularly beat NFL Sunday Night Football in head-to-head match-ups last season.
Thankfully, there’s a new threat on Fear the Walking Dead besides zombies now, which should see interest in the series return in the back half of season one. On the other hand, the third episode did see three of its characters spend part of the episode playing Monopoly, so there’s some reason to be concerned about the choices the series is making so far. I mean, at the very least, they should’ve gone with Boggle — there’s a lot more action involved.
(Via EW)