Despite Lagging Far Behind The Walking Dead, Dead City Is 2023's Biggest Cable Debut
Dead City just became the biggest cable drama debut of this year, but its viewership gap with the original series is still insane.
The original The Walking Dead series reached the peak of its popularity by season 5: its premiere saw over 17 million live viewers on just cable. But even that didn't save the show from eventually dying off as its finale drew "only" over 2 million people.
With the flagship show's end, the creators of The Walking Dead placed their bets on spin-offs — and after TWD's loss of viewers in the end, there were reasonable concerns that Dead City, the first of the spin-offs, might seriously underperform. But the AMC management appears content with the results.
The first episode of The Walking Dead: Dead City drew around 1.12 million live cable viewers (on AMC, BBC America, and IFC combined), and it's a decent result considering how few people even watch cable these days. For the streaming service users, Dead City also came out on AMC+, but the numbers from there are not disclosed yet.
Dan McDermott, AMC's President of Entertainment, is happy with the release views of Dead City as even despite the huge gap the spin-off has with the original series, Dead City still became the biggest cable drama debut of 2023, and that's quite an accomplishment in itself.
"We are thrilled so many viewers joined Maggie and Negan in the streets of Manhattan for the first episode of The Walking Dead: Dead City. The thrill ride keeps rolling from here, and we can’t wait for the fans to see all the twists and turns in the city that never sleeps. Turns out walkers don’t sleep, either," McDermott jokingly stated.
You may think that The Walking Dead franchise itself has dried out since even the very first episode of the original series had five times as many live viewers back in 2010 (just under 5.5M), but this doesn't seem to be the case.
In over a dozen years between the premieres of TWD and Dead City, the vast majority of the audience simply switched from cable to streaming completely, so it was pretty much impossible to expect comparable numbers.
We'll have to wait and see how Dead City performs in the future... And how well will the other two spin-offs do, especially the one centered around fans' all-time favorite character, Norman Reedus's Daryl Dixon.
Source: THR