Herein lies the problem with only making certain episodes into event television.
As we told you just yesterday, AMC’s “The Walking Dead” is rapidly losing viewers in its current seventh season. Mind you, the show has still been holding steady at around 11 million viewers per episode these last several weeks – at the time of writing this post, we don’t yet have the numbers for this past Sunday night’s Tara-centric episode – but it’s nothing if not a tad bit alarming that the seventh season has seen the sharpest episode-to-episode decline in the show’s history. Furthermore, the current episode ratings are the lowest the hit zombie series has posted since Season 3 back in 2013.
Of course, there are likely a multitude of reasons why the ratings are dropping – some have suggested that the brutal season premiere was just too much, while others feel that Negan hasn’t lived up to the hype as a villain – and if you asked individual viewers, you’d probably get different answers to explain why they’ve decided to tune out. This season’s fractured storytelling certainly isn’t doing much to help matters, nor are the tonal issues, and we’ve got a strong feeling that an extended episode about Tara this past Sunday night wasn’t exactly what viewers needed to pull them back in. Needless to say, the series hasn’t quite been able to capitalize on the game-changing Season 7 premiere in a very compelling way.
But in order to really understand what’s going on here, I think we need to realize that the show’s recent ratings troubles aren’t exactly anything new. Granted, we’ve never seen this steady of a decline in viewership before, but looking at the episode-by-episode ratings chart found over on Wikipedia, it’s clear that there’s a definite pattern to the show’s ratings. And it’s a pattern that the show, by the very nature of the way it conducts business, has entirely brought upon itself.
As you can see in the ratings graph above, “The Walking Dead” tends to post its best ratings at the beginning, middle, and end of each season, and its worst whenever a season isn’t either coming or going. Naturally, TV shows are more must-see when they’re airing premieres and finales, but with “The Walking Dead” in particular, it seems that an increasing number of viewers are only really interested in the comings and goings. Why? Because “The Walking Dead” has consistently told them that those are the only episodes where big, must-see things are actually going to happen.
And viewers have started to catch on.
Whenever a season is beginning, ending, or being split down the middle with a mid-season finale, “The Walking Dead” tends to pull out the big guns and really get people talking, but the problem with this approach is that the episodes in-between tend to feel like filler – and that’s perhaps never been more true than it is right now, in Season 7. Mind you, longtime viewers of the show understand that those bottle episodes are hugely important in the grand scheme of things, building to big moments in a way that makes those big moments actually mean something – the Tara episode, for example, set up a new community of potential allies in the battle against Negan and made us care more about Tara, which will count when her life is on the line… so don’t go telling me it was an episode of pointless drivel – but it’s not hard to see why large swaths of viewers have decided to only tune in for those big events. When you don’t NEED to watch every week, what’s compelling you to watch every week?
So what’s the answer here? Does every single episode of each 16-episode season need to be shocking, game-changing, and full of action and excitement? No, and that’s really not how television works anyway – nor is that kind of storytelling what “The Walking Dead” has ever been about. It’s inherent to TV shows that there’s going to be episodes that inspire water cooler talk and others that exist as filler to pad out the story, but maybe what “The Walking Dead” needs to do is start showing us that big things can and will happen at random, rather than at the most obvious and expected times. Every episode doesn’t need to be a game-changer, but if those big episodes are sprinkled throughout each season rather than merely used as book-ends, viewers will likely start to realize that they need to tune in every week. And when you NEED to tune in, you tune in.
Take FOX’s “The Exorcist,” for example. We’ve been raving about the series for months here on Bloody Disgusting, and one of the big reasons we love the show so much is because it’s constantly shocking and surprising us with big events that we never possibly could’ve seen coming. Without spoiling it for anyone who’s not caught up, “The Exorcist” has now completely changed the game on at least two noteworthy occasions, first in Episode 5 and then in Episode 8. The twist in Episode 5 was a season finale moment if I’ve ever seen one, but by rocking our socks with it in a random episode midway through the season, FOX essentially told us that anything can happen at any time. And they delivered on that promise in Episode 8, bringing to the table another episode that felt like a season finale.
If regular episodes feel like finales, how crazy are the finales going to be?!
Mind you, “The Walking Dead” doesn’t always save big events for finales. Back in Season 6, we were out-of-nowhere teased with the death of Glenn in the third episode, and though it ended up being a fairly devious cliffhanger that didn’t at all play out the way it initially appeared to, it totally worked. The ratings spiked from Episode 3 to Episode 4, and Season 6 was all around the show’s overall highest-rated season to date. With the Episode 3 shocker, AMC made us feel like anything could happen at any time, and the aforementioned ratings graph shows that the tactic worked like a charm.
The reality is that viewers, tweeters, and website writers bemoan how boring “The Walking Dead” is every single season and yet they keep on coming back for more, so if I was AMC, I wouldn’t be too concerned about the declining ratings and all the negative think pieces. Again, this is a trend that has plagued every season of the show to date, but there’s maybe going to come a point – and we may already be there – where viewers are going to tune out and tune out for good. And the only real way for “The Walking Dead” to win the ship-jumpers back is by making them feel like they NEED to be in front of their TV every Sunday night. We need to feel like missing any given episode is simply not an option. And most importantly, we need to feel like every single episode could be the next big one. The next great one.
We need to be shown that we should always expect the unexpected.
Am I right, Rick?
