‘The Walking Dead’ season 5 premiere becomes even more massive in live+3 numbers
Already, “The Walking Dead” pretty much holds bragging rights over anyone and everyone in the TV galaxy with the way that it dominated the ratings for its season 5 premiere. Well, you may now have to say that even more now that the live+3 ratings are out for the episode on AMC.
Per the latest news via Deadline, the show added another 5.086 million viewers to its initial audience of 17.3 million, which puts them basically at 22.386 million viewers with three days of DVR viewing factored in. That’s an enormous audience, really without a parallel on cable TV especially.
When you are discussing the 18-49 demographic, the show added another 3.54 million viewers, which brings its total here to 14.523 million. In translating this over to a rating, this means that the premiere drew an 11.7. This is a higher demo rating than anything on primetime through the entire fall, including broadcasts of “Sunday Night Football” on AMC. This is basically a feeding frenzy that network executives are probably celebrating like Carl Grimes when he found all that pudding.
Of course, we do expect there to be some ratings declines in the coming weeks, if for no other reason than that it is almost impossible to keep up domination of this level, and viewers do tend to fall behind on things during a season. The next chance the show has to break its own record is the fall finale, but then it’ll get another chance with its winter premiere in February, and then its season 5 finale in late March.
Do we think that it’s going to do it? Ultimately, it’ll be close. It feels like the show is getting close to peaking at this point. All successful shows have a ceiling, and in this, AMC should just be thankful that “The Walking Dead” has built up for this long.
If you want to read some more coverage on the show, including previews, you can do so over at the link here today! Also, be sure to sign up to score even more TV news and updates right now via our CarterMatt Newsletter. (Photo via AMC.)