Fear The Walking Dead Ratings: Second Place Sunday, Slight Drop

Fear the Walking Dead finished in second place for ratings on Sunday night as the AMC zombie series saw a drop in total viewership against its season five premiere numbers one week earlier. Fear the Walking Dead Episode 5×02 drew a total audience of 1.687 million viewers for a 0.5 rating in the key 18-49 demographic. It was a finish behind TLC’s 90 Day Fiance: Happily Ever After? which posted a 0.6 rating with an audience of 2.056 million viewers. Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 aired on TNT, finishing in third place with 1.471 million viewers and a 0.5 rating.

AMC’s new NOS4A2 aired a new episode directly after Fear the Walking Dead, replacing Talking Dead (for now), earning a 0.2 with 891,000 total viewers.

Fear the Walking Dead won the previous Sunday with a 0.6 rating in adults 18-49 and 1.97 million viewers for its Season 5 premiere, which TV by the Numbers reported was down one-tenth from its Season 4 midseason premiere and that season’s finale. (Fear the Walking Dead‘s pilot was watched by 13.96m viewers in August 2015; Season 2 opened at 6.67m and Season 3 5.08m).

Sunday night’s upcoming Episode 5×03, directed by Fear the Walking Dead star Colman Domingo, will look to bounce back in terms of ratings. Building on the excitement of the return of Ruben Blades as Daniel Salazar from the most recent episode, Episode 5×03 will bring a key character from The Walking Dead into the mix. If not a massive bump in live viewership, Fear the Walking Dead will likely gain in the days which follow as word of mouth often proves to be important for Live+3 gains for both Fear and the flagship The Walking Dead series.

“Our decline has really mirrored the declines across basic cable — we just had higher to fall from,” Sarah Barnett, president of AMC’s entertainment networks group, told Vulture. “The fact that [The Walking Dead is] still the No. 1 show by a margin of two to one is quite something. One of the things that I take such encouragement from is the fact that our ratings are pretty stabilized. We did see declines at the beginning of [Season Nine], but through all of the back half of this season, we are seeing the kind of stability that we’ve never really seen in this property before. We believe that we’ve hit a core, and that if that core sits around the numbers it is, it will continue to be a complete phenomenon in cable TV in 2019.”

ComicBook.com’s interview with Colman Domingo will be available following the east coast broadcast of Fear the Walking Dead Episode 5×03 on Sunday night. For now, also check out Domingo opening up about his relationship with Kim Dickens since her departure from Fear in Season 4. What do you think of Season 5 of Fear the Walking Dead so far? Share your thoughts in the comment section or send them my way on Instagram or Twitter!

Fear the Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9pm ET on AMC. The Walking Dead returns for its tenth season in October. The Rick Grimes movies have not yet been given a release date.