‘American Horror Story: Roanoke’ ratings hit a hard fall for episode 2

One of the biggest calling cards for “American Horror Story” at this point, at least in terms of ratings, is that the show tends to take a pretty hard fall following the premiere. It doesn’t really seem to matter if the show is good or not.

Ultimately, this happened again this year for their new “Roanoke”-themed batch of episodes. After the first episode drew an impressive 2.8 rating in the 18-49 demographic that came close to breaking show records, Wednesday’s second episode drew a 1.8, down over 35% from the first outing.

Is this news all terrible? Not really, even if this was a bigger drop than last year. We still feel confident that this season will average better numbers than “Hotel” for many reasons, starting with that we’re looking at a better product this time. Quality matters, and many of the viewers the show “lost” may have elected to just watch it via DVR instead of live.

Also, consider the show’s upcoming schedule. “American Horror Story” really tends to hit rock bottom in its airings from November until January, and in starting earlier and giving us only ten episodes this season, we’re probably going to land in a situation where the show ends before it starts to really get extremely irrelevant following Halloween. This is the schedule that the show should have been using all along — and same goes for ten episodes. There was a LOT of fluff that could have been effectively cut from “Hotel.”

We’ll be back next week to look further at the ratings; we still feel that the odds of a season 7 are high, provided that the parties involved still want to do more.

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