Ratings: ‘Into the Badlands’ suffers bad drop without ‘The Walking Dead’

Let’s face it: It was a foregone conclusion that without “The Walking Dead” on the air, “Into the Badlands” was going to hit a little bit of a rough patch. One of the biggest questions was just how rough this said patch was going to be. Would the show lose all of its audience without the lead-in?

While the news from Sunday night is not great news for AMC, it’s not a complete disaster either. The fourth episode of the martial arts drama drew a 1.1 rating in the 18-49 demographic, which is a drop of more than 50% from the most-recent episode. However, it is also comparable to many other top shows on cable including recent episodes of “American Horror Story: Hotel,” so it is definitely a good-enough rating to merit sticking around in its own right. (If you missed it, the show has reportedly been renewed for another season.)

It’s not even fair to say at the moment that this drop should be attributed only to the lack of a lead-in. We imagine that there were also some out there who probably expected to see the show go off the air along with the zombie series, which means that they may have had to catch up with it at a later time. It’s inevitable to pair up one show with another, especially given AMC’s recent marketing strategy.

The most important thing to not here is mostly that this show is no “Low Winter Sun,” the infamous AMC series that scored terrible ratings when the network tried to split up new episodes of “Breaking Bad” in its final season and the “Talking Bad” aftershow.