‘Pretty Little Liars’ Hits Season Debut Viewership Low, ‘Stitchers’ Premieres OK

It was night of beginnings on ABC Family on Tuesday with the return of the channel’s most watched series and the debut of its first procedural drama. However, with a 1.1 rating among adults 18-49 and an audience of 2.378 million, Season 5 of Pretty Little Liars may not have provided Stitchers with the launch pad ABC Family hoped for.

For one thing, while even among the demo with the Season 5 premiere on June 10 2014, last night’s “Game On, Charles” episode was down 13% in total viewership from last year’s opener. While the top scripted original on cable last night, Tuesday’s Season 6 debut now turns out to be the least watched premiere in the show’s history. The previous low was the 2.47 million who tuned in for the very first show of Season 1 on March 21, 2011. The series debut did better than last night’s show by a slight but noteworthy 4%. The viewership of the Season 6 opener was also down 10% from the Season 5 finale of March 24, 2015. Last night’s PLL slid 15% in the 18-49 demo from the S5 ender. Not that PLL has any worries about being axed – ABC Family renewed it for a Season 6 and a Season 7 last year.

Among the other demos of Women 18-34 (2.3 rating) and Females 12-34 (2.6 ratings), last night’s PLL was the top show on all of TV. In the demos of Women 18-49 (1.7 rating), Viewers 12-34 (1.5 rating) and Adults 18-34 (1.4 rating), the Season 6 opener was No. 1 in primetime cable. With activity 426,00 tweets last night, PLL maintained its strong social media presence. It did not however crack its own top 5 Twitter results as the most tweeted scripted show in cable history. With that mouthful over, the most tweeted episode of PLL was the August 27, 2013 telecast with 1,892,028 tweets

With all that math in mind, Stitchers had some subtraction to deal with last night with its 9 PM debut. The Jeffrey A. Schechter EP’d and written series about a young woman who is recruited by the feds to hack into the minds of the dead to solve murders drew a 0.5 rating and 1.28 million viewers in total. That’s a 56% drop in the demo from its PLL lead-in and a 46% fall in viewership. Worth mentioning that ABC Family has been previewing Stitchers online the past few weeks too. Having said that, Stitchers‘ demo result was exactly the same as Chasing Life pulled in the same slot after the PLL S5 debut. Then again, that Stateside adaptation of the Spanish-language Mexican series Terminales got picked up for a second season, which is set to debut on August 17. Viewershipwise, Stitchers was down 4% from Chasing Life’s pilot.