The Walking Dead: Ratings Beat Out Sochi Olympics Closing Ceremony

The Walking Dead continues to dominate cable television as it beats out the ratings for the Sochi Olympics closing ceremony. For the age group 18-49, The Walking Dead scored a 6.6 rating, which brought in 8.4 million viewers. NBC’s coverage of the closing ceremony for Sochi Olympics had a 3.2 rating, and brought 4.09 million viewers.

This is the third consecutive week that AMC’s The Walking Dead had went head to head with NBC’s coverage of the Olympics. The Walking Dead drew in an 8.2 rating on its mid-season premiere, while Sochi brought in a 4.8 rating for its premiere. I think its pretty clear that people in America would rather watch flesh-eating zombies kill people, than watch the Olympics.

Sunday being the last night of NBC’s coverage of the Winter Olympics, There’s no other program on television to go toe-to-toe with The Walking Dead. Ever since The Walking Dead premiered in September, their ratings, and viewership have been golden. They even went head-to-head with Sunday Night Football.

AMC has definitely struck gold with The Walking Dead. AMC this past year has been the most popular network on cable television because of solid shows such as The Walking Dead, and Breaking Bad. Breaking Bad was finishing up its eight episode run in a matter of 2 months, and for the final 75 minute long episode that brought in 10.3 million viewers, with a 5.4 rating for adults 18-49. Still its not as high as The Walking Dead’s ratings, and viewership, but for show that started off slow, it’s pretty impressive.

Breaking Bad premiered its first season in 2008, and it averaged to just 1.2 million viewers. When the series started airing on Netflix, that’s when viewership started to skyrocket for Breaking Bad. Netflix let fans who didn’t start watching the show back in 2008 catch up with what they have missed, and by the time the final eight episodes were airing, each episode had a rating of 5.4 per episode.

Unfortunately all great things must come to an end, but maybe not? AMC has announced they are doing a spin off for Breaking Bad called Better Call Saul, and yes Saul is the main character, but the show will be a prequel to before Saul met Walter White. That’s not the only spin off AMC is making, AMC will be making a spin off of The Walking Dead as well, but no other details have been released about that yet.

For now, The Walking Dead will just have to keep us entertained on Sunday nights.