Did 'Walking Dead' Bounce Back This Week?

Commentators have been watching ratings for The Walking Dead carefully this season, trying to determine if the series' unprecedented slide is an indication of serious instability. Optimists have held on to the hope that ratings would improve as the series nears its mid-season break. Those hopes were dealt a major blow with the release of ratings numbers for the latest episode.

Last Sunday's episode, the sixth episode of the seventh season, earned a 4.9 rating in the all-important 18-49 age demographic. That's a season low and a drop of four percent from the previous week's episode. Every episode of the season after the premiere episode has set a new season low point, and this week's rating represents a disastrous 42 percent drop from the season's first episode. No other season of the series has seen such a precipitous and consistent decline.

Perhaps even more concerning is the episode's total viewership, which also set a season-low mark with 10.4 million viewers. You have to look all the way back to the sixth episode of the third season in 2012 to find a less-watched episode. Season seven also now has the lowest average per-episode ratings of any season since the third.

Every season of TWD so far has seen an uptick in ratings at the end of the season's first half. Season seven now has two episodes left to reverse a trend that's becoming more dire with each passing week.