The Walking Dead Season 8 Finale Ratings Are Kind Of Bad

Are The Walking Dead's glory days over? The ratings for the Season 8 finale are in and they're not great--at least as far as The Walking Dead is concerned. Nearly 8 million viewers tuned in to see the end of Rick's (Andrew Lincoln) war with Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), which made it the biggest show on cable that night.

However, the ratings paint a bleak picture. As reported by Variety, this was a 30 percent drop from the audience that tuned in to watch the Season 7 finale one year before. In fact, this was the lowest-rated finale since Season 1, which brought in 6 million viewers. According to Variety, the highest was Season 5, in which 15.8 million tuned in to see Morgan (Lennie James) finally reuniting with Rick.

While ratings for the AMC zombie series continue to be on a downward trend, it still has the type of viewership many other shows would kill for. That said, it's only a matter of time before that's no longer the case. If the zombie show keeps bleeding viewers like it has been, it's going to become a walker itself.

As for Fear the Walking Dead, which saw Morgan join the cast of characters after jumping from the mothership, the Season 4 premiere saw just over 4 million viewers tune in. While that's a loss of nearly half of the audience from its The Walking Dead lead-in, it's also nearly double the Season 3 finale's viewers.