‘Better Call Saul’ season 2, episode 2 ratings slide despite lack of Grammy competition

Back when “Better Call Saul” premiered to just a 1.1 rating in the 18-49 demographic, one of the common justifications we heard for it across the internet was that the Grammy Awards must have taken a big chunk of viewers away from the series. Trying to figure out competing audiences sometimes is a difficult proposition; we didn’t think there was a huge crossover between music fans and the AMC show from Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, but we were willing to content it may have had a marginal impact.

Now that we’ve seen the episode 2 ratings, it seems almost as though the Grammys did not play much of a role at all. The show declined to a 1.0 episode in the demo, which is the lowest rating that we’ve seen the show draw to date.

So what’s at play here? The most obvious reason for declining numbers is likely just the presence of such things as Netflix and DVR machines. The live+3 figures for the show will be tremendous, and it’s likely that AMC will celebrate them. It’s just unfortunate that they cannot monetize the figures in the same exact way that they can live+same day, when viewers actually have to sit through all of the commercials.

As for Netflix, it’s really hard to measure that as an outsider, though we have to assume the ratings are still pretty good over there. Sure, “Better Call Saul” may not be as exceptional as “Breaking Bad” before it, but it’s still a very good show worthy of all of the attention and ratings possible.

(Photo: AMC.)