Outlander season 3 finale ratings down — the season’s performance as a whole

Before we doing else, let’s start things off by reporting the Outlander season 3 finale ratings — the end result is somewhat of a surprise.

The numbers for “Eye of the Storm” are in, and in total the Starz series ended up generating 1.43 million viewers — a respectable total, but down versus the prior week. Given the hype that does tend to surround finales we anticipated that the show would’ve gone up past 1.6 million and challenged “First Wife” for the #2 episode of the season.

So, what happened? The simple assumption here is that the majority of viewers who have Starz also have the ability to watch the show on the app. We know there were many Outlander fans who chose to watch the finale at midnight, the moment that it first became available. More viewers than usual, understandably, probably didn’t want to wait until 8:00 p.m. Eastern time to watch the end of the season — the numbers that we report here are just the live+same-day TV numbers. We wish that there was a way to measure app views, streams, and On-Demand viewings without waiting for a press release, but that is the position we find ourselves in with this show. Maybe at some point this week Starz will release a new estimation of Outlander and its total viewers — we know that it’s more than 5 million a week, and as a result of that it’s hard to bummed out about the series not setting a record in live+same-day. It is, after all, a somewhat-archaic way of measuring television viewership. It’s just the only one we have.

As for looking at the entire season, season 3 was an enormous victory for Starz. Outlander averaged around 1.5 million viewers and was up significantly versus the 1.09 million who caught season 2 live. While CarterMatt knows that season 2 was hindered somewhat by airing on Saturdays, we think that more viewers discovered the show in the past year.

What does this mean for the future?

We know that there is an Outlander season 4 coming in 2018 — it’s nice to have it confirmed that it’s coming next year! Beyond that, we remain hopeful that a season 5 is coming up. There are talks underway and maybe we’ll get so lucky as to get that announcement before Christmas. If not, let’s hope that it will come early next year. There is no reason to think that Starz will be making us wait any longer than that, since they more than likely want to keep the show on the same filming and airing schedule that it’s on now.

As soon as more news is announced, we’ll have it for you here.

What do you think about the Outlander season 3 finale ratings? Be sure to share in the comments below!

For some more news on the Outlander finale, be sure to head over here to read our full review of what transpired. Also, like CarterMatt on Facebook to get more news on this show and some others we cover. (Photo: Starz.)