Everyone raves about Breaking Bad but I just saw the numbers and it didn't actually get huge viewership until season 4.

Found this on a Nielsen ratings breakdown while scrolling last night, and it's crazy to me that a show considered the gold standard barely had 1.5 million viewers for its first two seasons, so how many people are just repeating what they heard online?

2 comments

2 Comments

terry_barnes1mo agoMost Upvoted

Ah come on, you can't judge a show by its first season numbers like that. Breaking Bad was a slow burn and it took time for word of mouth to spread, plus AMC was a tiny network back then compared to CBS or ABC. @benreed is right that Lost's real audience wasn't as huge as people thought, but that's different from Breaking Bad which actually built its audience the right way season by season. The quality was there from the start, it just needed time to catch on. And Netflix only helped push it to people who were already hearing about it from friends, not from nowhere.

benreed1mo ago

Remember watching Lost religiously back in the day and thinking everyone I knew was tuning in, then years later finding out it was actually a pretty niche show compared to something like CSI or American Idol. My brother in law worked at a TV station around then and he'd always say the shows people talked about the most weren't the ones pulling the biggest numbers. Kinda makes you wonder how much of Breaking Bad's reputation got built after it hit Netflix and people binged it all at once later on.