Ratings: ‘Luther’ season 4 improves in United States, draws highest rating to date

While “Luther” may be more of a success story in Great Britain, the truth here is still that despite having a big-name star in Idris Elba and being one of the finest entries out there when it comes to crime TV, the series has some work to do finding viewers in America.

For the airing of its TV movie on BBC America on Thursday night, it is certainly fair to say that the results were a little mixed. Per Deadline, around 252,000 people caught the show on the network, which is the highest rating for any “Luther” installment to date on the network. That’s great news, but at the same time only a quarter of a million viewers would be counted as pretty poor among other networks.

The reality here is that BBC America doesn’t have the widest net of any cable network out there, and finding ratings for many scripted series on there other than “Doctor Who” has always been a great challenge.

As we reported on Friday, the series drew almost five million viewers on BBC One earlier this week, a slight decrease from the start of season 3. In the UK the show is being divided up into two separate parts, with the second of which coming on Tuesday as an epic conclusion. We’ll be thrilled to have some more news on that as we get a little bit close to it airing over there. There is still a potential future for this franchise, but it is much more likely to end up on the big screen than on television based on recently interviews.

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