‘Bates Motel’ season 3 premiere slides in the ratings

While you may have enjoyed much of the darkness within the first episode of “Bates Motel” season 3, a smaller percentage of you enjoyed it life in comparison to seasons past.

The season 3 premiere of the A&E drama series managed to draw in total a 0.9 rating in the 18-49 demographic, which was down from the 1.2 it had for the season 2 opener. Also, the show lost around 30% of its viewership as a whole. While these numbers may be startling, they are pretty close to what Freddie Highmore and Vera Farmiga received for the end of season 2, which makes the real culprit here mostly the middle of last season when thinking about the decline in numbers.

With all of this said, we don’t really think that it helped the show much to compete against both “The Voice” and the finale of “The Bachelor” last night. While there may not be a huge crossover between the audiences, we do at least think that a good many people out there may have had another family member already commandeering the TV by the time that 9:00 p.m. Eastern rolled around. We used to hate the show being at 9:00 p.m. when it was there last season, but we like it better for season 3. We could see it and “Better Call Saul” sharing a good share of viewers, so it is better for both that there is not a whole lot of competition when it comes to that.

We’ll have a better chance to see where the ratings lie in the weeks ahead. We want to think that A&E will see this series through no matter what, but this is a network that lacks a really good track record when it comes to cancellations.