True Detective Gets Scorched by The Walking Dead Ratings
By Josh Hill
True Detective is still a ways away from premiering its second season – or seemingly rolling cameras, but already the show is being beat by not being on. The Walking Dead premiered the fifth season of the show on Sunday night, and it was watched by a record setting audience for AMC.
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According to Yahoo!, the Nielsen ratings were through the roof for the season premiere of the show as AMC notched over 17 million viewers for the episode.
"Nielsen estimates that an average audience of 17.3 million watched Sunday’s premiere, besting the show’s previous high — 16.11 million for its fourth-season premiere a year ago — by more than 1 million."
This is about five million more viewers than True Detective averaged for the first season, which is a stunning number. What this stands as proof of is that True Detective is still a wildly unestablished show and it doesn’t quite have the weight it may think it has to throw around HBO.
Just over 11 million viewers watched True Detective’s first season, wit the finale tallying almost four million real time viewers. A lot of True Detective’s audience came from HBO Go, which there isn’t anything wrong with but it’s what mentioning when the show is torched so badly by another.
Fans can’t be all that upset about the ratings, but what it shows is that True Detective is missing out on rewarding its fans with new episodes in a timely manner, something that is starting to hurt the series in a bad way.