AMC Is Not Concerned With ‘The Walking Dead’ Ratings Decline

The Walking Dead S9 Ratings SDCC

The ratings for the once immensely popular zombie show, The Walking Dead, now more closely resemble one of the shows walkers compared to what they once were, but AMC execs aren’t phased in the slightest.

With ratings dropping by nearly half for the past few seasons, you would imagine the AMC offices would be on fire as they scramble to figure out what to do. But, as it seems, cooler heads will prevail for cable juggernaut. It seems president of AMC’s entertainment networks group, Sarah Barnett, believes the people cutting cable are mostly to blame for the dip in The Walking Dead‘s viewership. She recently spoke with Vulture on the matter.

Our decline has really mirrored the declines across basic cable — we just had higher to fall from.

While viewership has drastically declined, the show still remains the top scripted series on cable television.

The fact that we are still the No. 1 show by a margin of two to one is quite something. One of the things that I take such encouragement from is the fact that our ratings are pretty stabilized. We did see declines at the beginning of [Season Nine], but through all of the back half of this season, we are seeing the kind of stability that we’ve never really seen in this property before. We believe that we’ve hit a core, and that if that core sits around the numbers it is, it will continue to be a complete phenomenon in cable TV in 2019.

Season 9  of The Walking Dead has had record low numbers for the series, having the lowest viewed season finale in the show’s history and also the lowest viewed episode, ‘The Calm Before,’ in the series history. In contrast, Season 9 also heralded the highest Rotten Tomatoes rating. AMC has no plans of slowing down The Walking Dead any time soon. In fact, they’re going harder than ever.

There are plans for a new series in The Walking Dead universe premiering next year, the upcoming season 5 of Fear The Walking Dead, the inevitable season 10 of The Walking Dead and even a film series with Andrew Lincoln reprising his role as the show’s former leading man, Rick Grimes.

What are your thoughts on the ever-expanding world of The Walking Dead? Do you think the ratings spell a different fate for the series? Should AMC be concerned with the rating drop? Let us know what you think in the comments below!

Source: Vulture