Good for Fear! And I bet TWD's fortune will be on the rise when word goes around that civilization is being rebuilt.

 

Reasons for the slipping interest in TWD are numerous, I would guess. Reason #1 for me would be the Negan storyline growing old and tired. (But here I am, watching faithfully - LOL!)

I would submit that FTWD simply benefited from TWD viewers not changing the station and watching. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

 

Haha!

I watched Fear the first two seasons, and I think I started S3, but somehow stopped. I've been looking around because I want to catch up and start back regularly here with S4, but can't find a place to watch all of S3. I too have heard the positive reviews which, coupled with Morgan's crossover, really has me wanting to get back to it.

 

Hulu I believe has fear

 

I would imagine FTWD higher ratings were from people that continued to tune in and maybe even moreso to see how Morgan would make his way to the FTWD universe.

 

There certainly as some good novelty - in characters, plot, props as well as some familiarity (ruses for capture, turning the tables on captors, Morgan). For me it was just seeing some interesting new characters that made the FTWD premiere almost on a par w/ TWD's season finale.

 

After Glenn's death, and especially the show's core (Carl) being killed, the show was destined to fizzle out rapidly in the ratings. Annnd, to no one's surprise, this is exactly what happened after his last episodes, and now at this brisk pace, TWD won't last much longer with this cast and story without a completely new show under the same name (perhaps one or two more seasons tops).

Even then, they'd have to cut the budget by at least half, resulting in cheap looking zombies, fake daylight/nighttime filters (like season 2) because "shooting outside is too expensive" and the new actors would potentially be shaky based on accepting a failed reboot of a once-successful show for very low pay (compared to current contracts for the longtime actors on the show). That's the only way AMC could stretch out the show's existence until it literally drops enough to be cancelled.

AMC pretends not to panic but they are panicked, because without this show's longterm success, they have nothing else to fall back on without the epic safe zone that TWD's ratings once held them within. A seemingly unbreakable shield of monetary network protection.

But they broke big time. It was actually not that long ago at all they were sitting pretty. It's embarrassingly epic how recent they were near the 11-12 mil. on average, and now struggle to get past the 7 million range, even for a finale. Hell, they managed to lose 3 1/2 millon viewers in only one month (March to April). And for all that, the architect of this disaster (Scott Gimple), got a promotion? The tap must truly be dripping poisonous water over there at TWD's headquarters since nothing else explains this remarkable absence of logic. The beginning of the end was indeed sealed by Scott Gimple killing Carl Grimes.

 

I think the beginning of the end was the Glenn Dumpster Dive. That's when the show began to lose their credibility of the audience.

The Carl death was the final straw for me. It was also a very, very stupid thing to do. It killed the soul of the show which was essentially a father and son surviving in the post apocalypse.

 

Season 8 Finale numbers for TWD Live +3:
4.7 demo rating - up 1.3 from same day viewing
10, 693 million viewers total - an increase of 2,754 million viewers

Season 4 Premier numbers for FTWD Live +3
2.3 demo rating - up 0.7 from same day viewing
5,696 million viewers total - an increase of 1,597 million viewers

http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/dvr-ratings/cable-live-3-ratings-for-april-9-15-2018/