The Walking Dead is a ratings steamroller. Its most recent figure from this season, including DVR, is 10.3, which is just insane. As Entertainment Weekly points out, even the programs that beat it in total viewers — specifically, Sunday Night Football and The Big Bang Theory — get bested when it comes to the all-important 18-49 demo. Think about that. A zombie drama on a cable channel that as recently early 2006 was best known for sometimes showing Lionheart at 1 a.m. is now dominating both football and the nation’s most popular network sitcom in the category that advertisers care about. And that’s not even the weird part.
No, the weird part comes at the bottom of that EW post, when you see that The Walking Dead, in all its landscape-shifting, network-buoying, zombie-murdering glory, still pulls in lower ratings than Jonathan Silverman’s short-lived sitcom The Single Guy got back in 1995.
This makes perfect sense if you let the rational part of your brain take over and point out that between dozens and dozens of new cable channels and streaming options like Netflix, viewership for individual shows has been steadily declining for the past couple decades. But that’s no fun. I mean, why do that when you can scream this fact out your window at the top of your lungs and let it float through air for a while, blowing every mind that the wind funnels it into? That’s a much better use of your time than doing something as silly and pointless as providing context. Here, look, I’ll show you:
THE WALKING DEAD GETS LOWER RATINGS THAN JONATHAN SILVERMAN’S SHORT-LIVED NBC SITCOM THE SINGLE GUY.
Now you try.
