‘Longmire’ season 4: Are renewal odds helped by season 3 finale ratings?

The official ratings for the “Longmire” season finale are in, and we’d have to say that they are by and large positive.

Overall, “Ashes to Ashes” brought in a 0.6 rating in the 18-49 demographic, and also close to 3.7 million viewers. In terms of total audience, this is the best figure that the show has scored in live + same day viewing since the season premiere. The downside is that it is down over 700,000 viewers from the season 2 finale, though this came at a time when there were multiple episodes getting more than 4 million viewers.

The fact that the show did rise for the finale, coupled with the overall quality of it and the cliffhanger, are all good sings to us that there will be a season 4. While we’re not 100% confident about it, we feel much better here than we do with one of our other beloved series in AMC’s “Halt and Catch Fire.” This show is a known commodity for A&E, and without a whole lot of other scripted hits right now, they need something like this for the summer. Also, with their sudden cancellation of “The Glades” last year, canceling another show that is obviously not ready to be over could start to lead to a bad reputation. With these shows, the last thing you want to do is create the impression that your network will not see original shows through. That’s something that is much more important for cable (which has to fight to find viewers) than for network TV.

With this being said, prepare for a long wait. A&E may be in no hurry to officially announce a renewal. If they do, the one bit of advice we’d have for the show is to find a reasonably well-known actor to recur next season. The show needs to get a few more headlines, and will hopefully as a result grab new viewers in the demo that matters most. The show skewing older is one of the only reasons we’re worried at all. (We don’t make the rules for ratings and demos, and we don’t like them, either.)