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‘The Walking Dead’ Ratings Cause Red Alerts With AMC Stocks

By Nick Younker
Published on: 11:33 PST, Jan 2, 2017

The Walking Dead Season 7 started out with one of the highest rated episodes in the history of the AMC show. But now that the big cliffhanger is over, the show has fallen back on hard times and revisited the decline that it saw last year following several seasons of unprecedented growth.

Fans of The Walking Dead stayed true to the AMC show over the years, at least the ones that were devoted to the show in the very beginning. But the expansion of the ratings on The Walking Dead from Season 2 through Season 5 was something that AMC and other industry experts did not see coming, thus giving the cable network the needed momentum to not only keep the show on the air, but to venture further into the market niche that they never realized existed.

Horror TV is a genre that has never really done well on the airwaves. But that was back when broadcast TV ruled the market. The expansion of cable and edgier content has allowed for shows like The Walking Dead to take the lead in the ratings and further expand the genre with other shows like American Horror Story and Penny Dreadful. The list is really quite extensive, considering the audience reactions to the Netflix hit show, Stranger Things.

But now, The Walking Dead is experiencing a recession in the ratings and the AMC stock is suffering because of it. Even though The Walking Dead is still the highest rated scripted drama on television in the key 18 – 49 demographic, it is one of the only shows on AMC that puts out those kind of numbers and thus leaves investors with twitchy trigger fingers when it comes to the AMC stock.

According to a report on Variety, the entertainment stock market was ripe with many ups and downs in 2016. They crowned Time Warner as the big winner for the year, but it was mostly attributed to the AT&T merger that boosted their stock. But that is not an apples-to-apples comparison for AMC and The Walking Dead.

AMC has had such a steady flow of successes with their TV shows that investors were actually quite timid as to their reliance on The Walking Dead as the breadwinner instead of getting momentum from other shows. Those other shows on AMC that have not been performing all that well includes Fear The Walking Dead, Halt and Catch Fire and Better Call Saul. With those being the top 3 behind The Walking Dead, the future was not too bright for the AMC stock prices.

In all, the AMC stock fell 30 percent in 2016, leaving the network and investors scrambling to find ways to improve that situation. There was only that boost at the beginning of Season 7 of The Walking Dead that gave it some hope. But the episodes that followed the premiere did not quite deliver and the falling ratings have taken the AMC breadwinner down a few notches.

Other shows that have been major hits on AMC include Breaking Bad and Mad Men. But now that their tenure at AMC is over, the network seems to rely solely on the successes of The Walking Dead to keep them on top. The falling ratings on The Walking Dead equal falling stock prices, clear and simple.

For those who have been keeping up with Season 7 of The Walking Dead, the show has already hit its mid-season finale and there is expected to be some big content coming now that all of the doom and gloom of the premiere is over. The tedious episodes that followed have been met with staunch criticism and The Walking Dead is preparing to give their viewers a more action packed Season 7B.

[Featured Image by AMC]

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