The Charts: The Walking Dead Tops Pretty Much Everything, And American Horror Story Also Charted Well

This column was delayed because chart data for the broadcast nets was running late this week due to those Nielsen adjustments (which are pretty minor), but that’s not the big story from the week of October 6th thru 12th.  Instead, The Walking Dead gets the headline as it returned for its fifth season with record ratings and topped pretty much all the charts.  The show was at Number 1 in the Nielsen Twitter Ratings, the Cable Top 25 based on total viewers, and in the General Sentiment charts tracking social network activity for the cable shows.  It’s 8.7 rating in the 18-49 also bested everything on the broadcast nets including Sunday Night Football (it also beat ESPN’s Monday Night Football the prior Monday) and its 17.3 million total viewers was better than everything else for the week except Sunday Night Football and it tied NCIS.  Heck, the repeat of last season’s finale that aired just before the S5 premiere pulled 6.8 million total viewers which is better than about half the shows on Prime Time for the week and a couple more eps from the TWD marathon made it into the Cable Top 25 for the week as well.  So this series is still a force and does not look to be slowing down anytime soon.

And lest I forget FX’s American Horror Story, that series may have been overshadowed by The Walking Dead‘s accomplishments, but it returned to all the charts as expected with its fourth season debut.  It came in just behind TWD on the Nielsen Twitter Ratings, and on the General Sentiment Charts covering cable shows.  And it ranked at Number 5 in the cable Top 25 based on total viewers.  And the 3.1 rating that the show garnered in the 18-49 demo would have put it in the Top 10 in it was airing on the broadcast nets.

And speaking of the broadcast nets, genre entries have been a bit skimpy in the Top 25 this year with only Once Upon A Time and Gotham on the list based on ratings and Person of Interest on the list based on total viewers.  And all three of those shows slipped from their prior week rankings.  Last season there were often three entries in the Top 25 based on ratings each week and sometimes four.  The broadcast nets did better on the social network charts, though, with all of the genre entries from The CW showing up in the General Sentiment Top 25 as I expected (including the recap episode prepping for the Supernatural S10 debut) and  four shows from the Big Four showing up there as well.  The Flash also managed to make it to the Number 6 slot on the Nielsen Twitter Ratings, though Vampire Diaries exited for the week.

Here is the full look at chart activity for genre shows for the week of October 6th thru 12th:

Nielsen Twitter Ratings ranked based on the Unique Audience – The total number of distinct Twitter accounts accruing at least one impression of one or more different Tweets ascribed to a TV episode.  More info at this link.

General Sentiment tracks activity across the social networks for shows airing new episodes in Prime Time (start times between 8:00 PM and 10:55 PM EST Monday – Saturday and 7:00 PM and 10:55 PM EST on Sunday).  This data collected on seven (7) major broadcast networks and 43 cable television networks.  More info at this link.