Did American Horror Story: Cult episode 6 ratings rise do to controversy?

The American Horror Story: Cult episode 6 ratings officially are in, and there were questions going in about how it would fare. The FX series got a lot of attention over a scene that presented a mass shooting in the wake of the terrible events that transpired in Las Vegas. We hoped that they would be sensitive when it comes to addressing that, and they ultimately were in how they decided after the fact to edit this particular scene out. (It was available for viewers who chose to watch the installment in other forms.)

Going into the episode, we were curious if hearing about the mass-shooting scene would hurt the show commercially, or if the attention it received would cause more to watch, even if it wasn’t shown in the end. The end result here surprises us mostly in just how little it changed one way or another. Episode 6 generated in total a 1.0 rating, which is actually the show’s smallest rating this season. It still only declined a few percentage points from the week before, which is pretty good retention week to week. In general the past three weeks have been fairly steady when it comes to the show, which is a sign that viewers are enjoying what they’re seeing at this point. With a show like American Horror Story, the biggest thing that you really want to do is stop the bleeding — this show always starts off really strong only to start to fall off here and there throughout the season.

In general, this season of American Horror Story is down versus many of the past ones — it’s down almost 20% to date from Roanoke. We’d love to see it perform a little better, even though it doesn’t necessarily need to in order to succeed and get more iterations on the air. It’s already been renewed, and for cable getting these sort of numbers really isn’t all that terrible. We’ll see what happens the rest of the season.

The biggest thing that we can hope for at the moment is that nothing else terrible happens in the world. After all, we know that there are going to be some truly terrible things that happen within the show and we don’t want to see anything close to that taking place within real life.

We’ll continue to have some ratings reports regarding American Horror Story and the series’ future for a stretch of time coming up — at the moment, the one thing we do know is that we’d like to see the show stabilize the rest of the way.

What did you expect to see in terms of the American Horror Story: Cult episode 6 ratings, and are you surprised by the results? Let us know in the attached comments right away.

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