Are Viewers Really Quitting ‘The Last of Us’?

Spoilers

I’ll admit, I was impressed that The Last of Us really went ahead and killed off Joel in the second episode of this season. It didn’t drag things out to get more screentime with the show’s most bankable star, Pedro Pascal, and it didn’t try to rewrite the narrative to avoid one of the most polarizing decisions from the game. I’m still unsure how the show will balance the Abby story moving forward, which was the other big narrative swing from “The Last of Us: Part II,” but I’m satisfied with how the show handled Joel.

Turns out not everybody feels the same as I do on that front.

There’s been a lot of chatter around various corners of the internet recently, from Reddit to actual websites I respect, shouting — in either panic or glee — some variation of “The Ratings Are Tanking!” But are viewers truly abandoning the show in droves since it killed off Joel? I’m not so sure. So I did some digging into the rumors and the numbers, to try and figure out what’s really going on.

The first thing I noticed is that the “ratings” being discussed aren’t necessarily the viewership numbers. Some sources are citing Nielsen data, but others are referring to a far squishier metric: Audience Scores. According to Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, The Last of Us season two remains a critical darling, but users are reviewing it far less kindly compared to season one. On Rotten Tomatoes, the audience rating dropped from 87% (season one) to 47% (season two), and on Metacritic the score went from 6.6 (season one) to 3.9 (season two). So yes, people are genuinely mad at this season, but I’m not exactly clutching my pearls over this reaction. It was to be expected: the second game also faced a severe drop in its audience scores compared to the first, and for pretty much all the same reasons. The male lead died, the (gasp!) lesbian character becomes the lead, and also the women are too muscular or something. It certainly smacks of review bombing, but there’s some genuine disappointment mixed in as well. Basically, the extremely polarizing decision to kill off Joel in the game remained polarizing in the show. Water is wet, etc.

As for the actual viewership numbers, there may be a decline happening — but it’s too early to know for sure. Anybody comparing week-to-week viewership for this season is operating off of Nielsen’s Live + Same Day numbers, which is essentially just a count of who tuned in for the broadcast itself, and that’s only a small part of the picture. It doesn’t tell us about all the people who caught up on the episodes through repeat broadcasts or on streaming, and that figure takes longer to report — and will be much, much larger. For example, the second season premiere saw an increase in viewers over the season one premiere, reaching 5.3 million viewers according to HBO (compared to 4.7 million viewers in season one). This number comes from the Nielsen Live + Same Day, which reported 938,000 linear viewers in the US, plus Warner Bros. Discovery’s own data about viewings on Max. This isn’t the full Nielsen data, but it is likely pretty accurate. At the very least, it shows that viewership grows by millions once catch-up viewing data is captured.

Unfortunately, we’ve only got those Live + Same Day numbers for subsequent episodes: 643,000 viewers for episode two and 768,000 viewers for episode three (I couldn’t find the numbers for episode four). So sure, it appears that there was a nearly 30% decline in linear viewers from episode one to episode two. It doesn’t look good, but there are a few things people aren’t saying when they’re busy projecting doom and gloom for The Last of Us. If people didn’t tune in for episode two, it wasn’t because Joel died. They didn’t know that yet! He died in episode two! Maybe they didn’t tune in because it aired on Easter, and holidays can be tricky for linear viewership — but will balance out when catch-up viewing is taken into account. In fact, viewership ticked back up for episode three, so you can’t really say Joel’s death precipitated a decline here.

The point is, same-day viewership data is just a drop in the pail, and we really need to wait for the full Nielsen data before determining that viewers are quitting The Last of Us en masse. Those steep declines may level out once catch-up viewing is accounted for, or it may reveal that even if some viewers have left, it’s not nearly as large a percentage as it appears right now. With three episodes left to go this season, we may even see some viewers joining the show just to see what all the fuss is about.

The internet remains full of angry weirdos with axes to grind and websites desperate to turn vague vibes into a story. The water! It is wet, I say!