The Walking Dead season 8 finale ratings: The highs and lows
For the time being, let’s start here with the positive: With a 3.4 rating in the 18-49 demographic and also 7.91 million viewers, this is the best performance for the series in both measures since the midseason premiere in February, otherwise known as the final episode for Chandler Riggs. Given the super-polarizing nature of that episode and some of the blowback that is still out there as a result of that decision, we suppose that it is still great news that the show has managed to perform every bit as well as it did.
Yet, this is also the lowest-rated season finale since all the way back in the first season, and we do think that this is a pretty major sign that The Walking Dead as a franchise is absolutely showing some great signs of fatigue these days. While it’s still the #1 basic cable series and it could be for a long time still, you do have to wonder if the numbers will fall to the point where it doesn’t get the same sort of attention.
Moving into season 9, one of the things to be hopeful about is simply that this show is changing things up. Negan is now a prisoner and with that, there are some other threats that the group is going to be taken on. There may be new focuses, new characters, and hopefully some more reasons for conversation. One of the contributing factors, at least from our vantage point, to the drop in Walking Dead viewers is that the show’s setting and story have gotten a little bit stagnant over the past year. While there were some clear battle scenes within the All-Out War, we would argue that there were fewer of them than any person expected going into the season.
Related – Check out some more of our thoughts on the finale
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