Cablemetrics: The Walking Dead, Talking Dead, Westworld, The Strain

These numbers are current through Monday, October 24.

WHAT MATTERS:

• Many like to reminisce about the days when a TV program could end its season on a cliffhanger and capture the national imagination for the entire summer. But it looks like that is still possible even in 2016, as The Walking Dead (8.36) exploded from a 2015-16 season that was mostly in the 6's and somehow found the show's second-best raw number ever. Whatever historical adjustment you use for this show, it's pretty clearly a more impressive performance than the raw series high, an 8.65 for the fall premiere two years ago. It's also probably gonna be over six times the big four league average for this season, which is getting into (or even beyond) Friends finale territory.

• Big death nights are always good news for the Walking Dead aftershow Talking Dead (3.66), which had probably its most impressive performance ever as well. Like with the mothership, it's a career second-best in raw numbers (it did a 3.86 for the spring 2015 finale). But it was up by a good bit more than TWD itself, compared with the year-ago fall premiere. It's also noteworthy that it pulled this off with an extended 90-minute runtime, since it's probably a show that drops a lot over the course of the telecast.

• The return of Dead was predictably not very good news for HBO's Westworld (0.69), which was down 25% week-to-week. Still, it was only about 10% behind the series premiere (which faced the relatively measly Fear the Walking Dead finale), and actually beat the 0.67 from debate night two weeks ago. Its lead-out comedy Divorce (0.18) took a similar drop at 10/9c. The only non-AMC show that had a relatively good showing was actually FX's The Strain (0.40), which posted its best number in about a month. Perhaps TWD was something of a de facto lead-in for the 10/9c drama?

FULL TABLE:

Name	Net	Ep	A18-49	Last	Seas	Avg	y2y	Proj	ProjPlus	Skew	Male
The Walking Dead	AMC	1	8.36		7	8.36	+13%	7.57	597	62%
Talking Dead Fall	AMC	1	3.66		3	3.66	+26%	2.72	214	61%
American Horror Story	FX	6	1.36	-7%	6	1.75	-7%	1.39	110	68%	42%
South Park	COME	5	0.76	-32%	10	1.05	+22%	1.08	85	77%	76%
Westworld	HBO	4	0.69	-25%	1	0.76		0.69	54	53%	62%
Shameless	SHOW	4	0.55	-4%	6	0.52	-24%	0.48	38	51%	50%
Atlanta	FX	8	0.44	+19%	1	0.46		0.45	36	63%	55%
The Strain	FX	9	0.40	+18%	3	0.42	-32%	0.41	32	55%	54%
Z Nation	SYFY	6	0.23	-12%	3	0.27	-24%	0.25	20	38%	50%
Better Things	FX	7	0.22	+47%	1	0.20		0.20	16	52%	42%
Divorce	HBO	3	0.18	-25%	1	0.19		0.17	13	35%
For Better or Worse	OWN	5	0.19	+12%	4	0.18	-33%	0.16	13	32%
Eyewitness	USA	2	0.15	-25%	1	0.17		0.14	11	32%
Falling Water	USA	2	0.16	-16%	1	0.17		0.14	11	38%	36%
Van Helsing	SYFY	6	0.16	-6%	1	0.18		0.17	13	31%	52%
Insecure	HBO	3	0.15	0%	1	0.14		0.14	11	40%
Masters of Sex	SHOW	7	0.12	-14%	4	0.12	-14%	0.12	9	33%
You're the Worst	FXX	8	0.12	+20%	3	0.11	-14%	0.11	9	57%

The Cablemetrics table can be sorted by clicking any of the categories at the top (and a second click will sort in the other direction.) After having sorted by a category, you can hold SHIFT and click another category to sort by the second category within the first.