Cable Ratings: Ray Donovan, Escape at Dannemora, and Dirty John
We’re in the thick of the holiday season, and because of that, there aren’t exactly a flurry of television shows on the air. Yet, there are a few, and our latest CarterMatt Ratings Watch piece we’ll be looking at the ratings for Ray Donovan, Escape at Dannemora, Counterpart, and then also Dirty John. These four shows all had the challenge of airing on December 23, which is hardly a good night for television ratings.
Yet, all four of the series are in an enviable position where live+same-day ratings don’t matter all that much. In the case of Ray Donovan, Counterpart, and Escape at Dannemora, you’re talking about premium-cable shows. Meanwhile, with Dirty John you are talking about an anthology series that, if renewed, can simply go in a different direction storywise.
Ray Donovan – Over the past several weeks, we’ve started to see the Liev Schreiber series really build some positive momentum and start to pick up a few more viewers. That momentum has slowed down slightly now. The December 23 episode, predictably, ended up generating 930,000 total viewers. That is the show’s lowest total viewership in more than a month, but given that there is already a season 7 planned plus it was airing over the holiday, Showtime probably isn’t that upset.
Escape at Dannemora – The limited series has been the subject of both critical attention and also a little controversy, but its ratings were actually reasonably unscathed by it airing two days before Christmas. Sunday’s episode generated overall close to 590,000 viewers, which makes it the second-most-watched episode of the entire run so far. With buzz in mind, we do anticipate some of these numbers to improve moving forward.
Counterpart – For the first time this season, the J.K. Simmons series posted ratings below 200,000 in total viewers. We are really worried about this show’s future, and not so much because of this one individual episode. It’s just down significantly from the first season when you look at the numbers across the board.
Dirty John – Finally, let’s turn to the Bravo series, the only one on this list that is actually airing on ad-supported cable — with that, it’s the only show that really has a demo rating that matters. With a 0.3 rating and just over a million viewers, Sunday’s episode was the lowest-rated to date; yet, Bravo doesn’t exactly have a ton of scripted programming. We have a hard time imagining that they are unhappy with this show’s performance and given the star power involved both behind and in front of the camera, we do still feel reasonably confident that it is going to be coming back for more.
Rest assured, we will continue to monitor the performance of all three of these shows in some shape or form the rest of the season.
What did you watch, if anything, on Sunday night? Be sure to share right now in the attached comments!