The Walking Dead and the Rotten Tomatoes Effect

With movie and TV reviews coming at us instantly, it’s no surprise that shows like The Walking Dead take a hit from what I call the “Rotten Tomatoes Effect.”

If you do a Google search right now, you’ll find a bunch of articles talking about The Walking Dead’s declining ratings. Showrunner Dave Alpert recently addressed the issue, countering that there is a very logical reason that counters the supposedly sinking ratings. We also released a ratings chart for the first half of season 8 that indicates ratings are holding steady. But perhaps the negative publicity of late has more to do with something else. In this case, I like to think of it as the “Rotten Tomatoes Effect.”

When it comes to TV viewing these days, we have more options that ever. You don’t even need a television to watch a show, rather you can wait and watch shows like The Walking Dead on the AMC website a few days after they air. Ratings are based on live views, but we already know that TV viewership is down because so many people choose to record and watch things later, or access them on demand.

Showrunner Dave Alpert alluded to this in a recent interview with Variety:

"“I don’t think in any way the brand has lost its relevance in general. I think we’re just seeing a decline in urgency across all media to consume something at a specific time.”"

This supports the idea that people are still watching but they aren’t watching live, which means that the whole concept of “ratings” as we once knew it fails to capture the actual number of people watching a show across all platforms.

Alpert’s statement alludes to “the brand,” referring to The Walking Dead as a whole. With the supposedly declining ratings comes the notion that perhaps people aren’t as interested in the zombie apocalypse show as they once were, but Alpert believes the brand is strong. Screen Rant refers to the “critical reception” of the show as another reason that the show is losing viewers, and this is really the root of the problem.

This is the “Rotten Tomatoes Effect.”

There was a lot of buzz about The Walking Dead prior to season 7. Newcomers to the series tuned in for the first time because of all of the buzz about Negan and the knowledge that someone was going to be leaving the show. Jeffrey Dean Morgan has been doing a fantastic job bringing Negan to life, and critics agreed, but those same critics also decried the way the story was shifting away from Rick and the survivors to a whole new world of multiple communities. Fans of the comics knew what was going to happen because the comics are source material for the show, but the casual viewer (especially the newcomers) didn’t know why the show had shifted this much.

That’s when the critical reviews started talking about the show slipping. With these reviews prevalent online and on social media with a quick search of “The Walking Dead” it started to look like the show was falling apart. This wasn’t the case at all, but it certainly looked that way because all you heard about was the bad stuff.

Rotten Tomatoes has come under fire recently for tanking movies with its rating system. The review aggregator collects reviews and assigns score to each film based upon positive or negative reviews. While some movies have been well received by audiences and in advanced screenings, the Rotten Tomatoes score doesn’t always reflect that, preventing some people from seeing those movies for fear of seeing a “bad movie.”

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So with all of the “bad press” out there about The Walking Dead’s slipping ratings and declining interest, you can see where some people might get caught up in the negative buzz. Whether or not they have seen the show in season 7 or 8 doesn’t matter; the fact that they have heard it isn’t good is all that matters. You can’t blame them — with all of the shows available these days, our time is at a premium. But the fact remains that constantly hearing that the show has gone south isn’t helping, especially since it isn’t true at all.

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