‘The Walking Dead’ season 6 premiere ratings fall; do we blame ‘Fear the Walking Dead,’ or fatigue?

Going into this season of “The Walking Dead,” we started to feel like the age of zombies eating up ratings was coming to a close. This was proven in some of the first ratings that have been released.

While the numbers are down, let’s not make too big of a deal out of this at the moment: They are still amazing. The first episode of the season drew a 7.3 rating in the 18-49 demographic and over 14.6 million viewers. Both of these figures are down more than 10% from the season 5 premiere, but in the demo this is still far and away the #1 show on TV. While “Empire” was starting to give it a run for its money, the Lee Daniels drama has experienced declines of its own three episodes into season 2.

So what do we blame for the decline in “Walking Dead” viewers? The obvious target, at least for the time being, is going to be “Fear the Walking Dead.” There are concerns about whether or not the spin-off may have saturated the show’s ratings in some way, and made people tired about zombies. Or, maybe it caused some casual viewers of the flagship to think that they needed to watch both to understand what was going on, and that was too much of a commitment for them.

Even with this said, we feel like there would have been a drop for “The Walking Dead” regardless of if there was a spin-off. No show can sustain a gigantic audience forever. It gets to a point where some people find other things to enjoy, and also where there is too much of a backlog for new viewers to catch up.

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