Pretty Little Liars: The Perfectionists ratings: How it compares to original

Going into Pretty Little Liars: The Perfectionists, one of the biggest mysteries had nothing to do with the central mystery. Instead, it revolved a little more around its potential success. Would this show manage to draw anywhere near the same numbers as its predecessor, a game-changing show and a pioneer in the Twitter generation? We didn’t think so, and for a few different reasons. For starters, Janel Parrish and Sasha Pieterse are the only returning cast members. Meanwhile, the audience for the original show is now so much older — Pretty Little Liars is a show with zeitgeist appeal. You enjoy it when you’re in a certain time in your life and when it’s all around you in your culture. Then, life moves on and the nature of the culture changes. You soon find yourself in a different world with different shows that you’re diving into on a weekly basis.

There was no way for The Perfectionists to be perfect, but we did expect the show to premiere with slightly better numbers than it did. It’s not in dud territory by any means, but it didn’t make us feel all that confident.

Wednesday night’s first episode ended up pulling a 0.2 rating in the 18-49 demographic and to go along with that, almost 460,000 viewers. That’s down dramatically from the final season of the original show, which drew on average a 0.6 rating and over 1.1 million viewers.  These numbers are more in line with the season 2 average of another Freeform show in Siren, or the season 1 totals for Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger. (To be fair, both Siren and Cloak & Dagger posted higher total-viewer averages than their full seasons.) We don’t want to give The Perfectionists too much credit right now, given that following a premiere the majority of the show’s out there start a slow decline. If it happens here, this show could end up posting under 400,000 viewers an episode. Maybe it’s enough to get it a season 2, but it’s certainly not going to give this show a “next Pretty Little Liars” label where we feel confident that there are seven seasons coming and enough twists to turn Twitter into a cavalcade of theories and frustrations when said theories are wrong.

We get it that The Perfectionists isn’t solely reliant on live viewers given that Freeform’s got a decent model set up so that streaming and DVR viewing can be considered a factor … but you still gotta consider the fact that this is one of those shows that really should inspire live viewing. It’s in that vein of “you need to watch live before your friends ruin it for you,” so we think starting off with around 600,000 viewers (which is still lower than the series premiere for either Siren or Cloak & Dagger) would have helped it out a little bit more.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll still keep a close watch on the numbers for The Perfectionists, but we gotta say that we expected bigger, stronger things from it more or less from the get-go.

Want to see more of what’s next with this show? – Then all you gotta do is visit the link here! That’s where you can see our latest preview for what’s next.

What do you think about the Pretty Little Liars: The Perfectionists ratings, and what they may also mean for the future of this series? Share now in the comments! (Photo: Freeform.)