Perhaps we can pass the ball and put the blame and the glory on LeBron James, but The Walking Dead took a record beating this weekend at the hands of the NBA.
As the Laker superstar-led Team LeBron scored a 178-164 win over Team Giannis in the primetime NBA All-Star Game on February 19, the usual king of cable fell to an all-time series ratings and viewership low.
Pulling in a 1.7 among adults 18-49 and 4.5 million viewers, the “Omega” episode revealing the origins of Whisperers leader Alpha (Samantha Morton) was down 15% in the demo from the Season 9 midseason return of February 10. In total sets of eyeballs, the zombie-apocalypse drama based on Robert Kirkman’s comics took a 12% tumble from the “Adaptation” episode of the week before.
The beginning of the rest of the ninth season was a midseason-return low for TWD, which has seen a steady decline in its ratings since the start of Season 7 in 2016.
The previous low among the 18-49s for what is still one of the top-rated shows on TV was the “Stradivarius” episode of November 18. The least-watched TWD before this week was the 4.71 million who tuned in for the Frank Darabont-developed show’s second “Guts” episode of November 7, 2010.
The most-watched episode ever of TWD remains the 17.3 million who clicked on to the “No Sanctuary” Season 5 opener on October 12, 2014.
Even though it knocked TWD off the cable top spot, the culmination of the NBA’s big weekend wasn’t exactly shooting only three-pointers. With 5.8 million viewers on TNT and 1.03 million on TBS, the All-Star Game slipped to its lowest audience in 11 years.
BTW, there will be no NBA All-Star Game this coming weekend and TWD isn’t bowing out on February 24 against the seemingly hostless Oscars. There will a “Bounty” on this Sunday on AMC.
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