‘The Bastard Executioner’ ratings: How are we faring four episodes in?

Checking in on the ratings for “The Bastard Executioner” is probably not something that we plan on doing on a weekly basis, mostly because if we were to do this for every show that we cover at CarterMatt, we wouldn’t have any time to do anything else.

However, this is something we do want to do here and there with this show, given our own personal passion for all things Kurt Sutter and also our fascination of how new series can fare in the Netflix era when it comes to generating large live audiences. After all, what is the incentive to watch a show live now for a viewer, other than maybe avoiding some spoilers on social media? The thing is with a show like this that we are so early into its run that we do not get the sense people are invested enough yet to care if someone tells them that a certain person dies or does something particularly shocking.

This sentiment is reflected in the ratings for the past two episodes. For episode three, the show shockingly lost half of its 18-49 audience in going from a 0.8 rating to a 0.4. The show did hold onto this rating for episode 4, and increased the total viewer count from 1.09 to 1.26. The positive here is that clearly, the show has already found its stable audience. Once you know the bottoming-out point, it is easier to speculate on future ratings.

The pattern now that “The Bastard Executioner” must follow to achieve greater ratings success is similar in a way to a “Breaking Bad” or to an extent “Sons of Anarchy”: It has to build buzz over time, and have enough people catching up on DVD or a streaming property to the point where they are invested enough to watch live. This does sometimes take a large commitment from a network, and thanks to FX being generally good with giving shows many opportunities, we have a feeling that a season 2 renewal is coming at some point in the near future. We should note that at this point, FX is gauging live+3 ratings more as a determining factor than live+same day.

If you did not get a chance to check out our most-recent episode review for “The Bastard Executioner,” you can do so over at the link here. Also, be sure to sign up right away to have some further TV updates on everything we cover sent over to you, courtesy of our CarterMatt Newsletter. (Photo: FX.)