Season 7 of The Walking Dead, which hit airwaves literally a year-and-a-day ago, had more than 17 million fans tune in to see which characters' heads would end up on the business end of Negan's barbed wire-wrapped bat "Lucille," following season 6's well done cliffhanger.
Unfortunately, season 7's ending didn't leave as many people hanging onto the edge of their seats (I guess) and the introductory episode to season 8, which aired this past Sunday night, was only able to draw about two-thirds of last year's record high opening audience (Oh, plus they also lost about 40 percent of the coveted 18-49 demo).
On top of those numbers, Season 8's premiere was actually pirated 42 percent less than season 7's which is, bizarrely enough, probably a bad trend, as folks who don't pay still indicate which shows people are highly interested in.
According to Variety, this past weekend's season premiere, "Mercy," drew just 11.4 million viewers. This figure actually represents the lowest total to watch a premiere of AMC's hit since season 3's opener, which had 10.86 million viewers all the way back in October 2012.
Despite that news, which sounds awful upon first glance, this past week's episode (which also happened to be the series' 100th) still clocked in as the highest rated show on Sunday night. Not bad for eight years of a genre we'd already seen worn the f out by, like, 2003. Still, as past evidence indicates, those numbers are only going to plummet, at least until the season 8 finale.
Catch you then.
