Ratings Report: FOX’s ‘The Cleaning Lady’ fights the Monday night network line-up, AMC’s ‘The Walking Dead’ takes its final steps

Broadcast: The sophomore season of The Cleaning Lady on FOX has fallen behind its premiere run in terms of ratings. The Oct. 17 airing of “The Brit”— the season’s fifth episode— only served to confirm this downward trend. The show’s Sept. 19 premiere foreshadowed the trajectory ahead when it garnered a 0.35 rating with adults 18-49 (A18-49) and measured 2.3 million total viewers. Episode 5 earned a 0.5 A19-49 rating and tallied 2.22 million viewers in total. Those numbers land noticeably under last season’s averages; a 0.46 A18-49 rating and 3.2 million viewers per episode. One factor that might be working against The Cleaning Lady of late is the uphill battle it fights every Monday night during the 9:00 PM EST/PST time slot. Facing off against network heavy hitters— namely NCIS (CBS), Bachelor in Paradise (ABC), and The Voice (NBC)— is no easy task. On Sept. 19, NCIS raked in 6.71 million total viewers and The Voice counted 5.93 million. At the same time, Bachelor in Paradise matched “The Brit” in viewership with 2.23 million watching, but snagged a 0.5 A18-49 rating, proving more popular with younger generations. The Cleaning Lady follows Thony De La Rosa, a Cambodian-Filipino former surgeon who is living undocumented in Las Vegas and working in the service industry. Racing against time to save her sick son, Thony finds herself inadvertently thrust into working for a criminal organization. 

The Cleaning Lady is an adaptation of the 2017 Argentine crime drama series, La Chica que Limpia. Executive producer Miranda Kwok, known for The CW’s The 100 and Starz’s Spartacus, developed the American adaptation for FOX. Melissa Carter, a writer-producer known for Stargirl and Queen Sugar, serves as showrunner. Elodie Yung (Daredevil, Gods of Egypt), Adan Canto (Designated Survivor, Blood & Oil), and Oliver Hudson (Nashville, Splitting Up Together) lead the cast, which also includes Martha Millan (The OA, Entourage), Sean Lew (Bizardvark, Glee), Faith Bryant, and Eva De Dominici (The Fragility of Bodies, Maradona: Blessed Dream). Twins Sebastien and Valentino LaSalle together portray Luca De La Rosa, the son of Yung’s Thony. The Cleaning Lady airs on Monday nights at 9:00 PM EST/PST on FOX. Episodes are available to stream on Hulu the day after their release. 

Cable: AMC’s The Walking Dead kicked off the third leg of its eleventh and final season with relatively low viewership given the show’s historic appeal. On Sunday, October 16, fans were treated to two episodes of the hour-long Zombie drama, the first airing at 8:00 PM EST/PST and the second at the 9:00 PM EST/PST, the show’s regularly scheduled timeslot. While the first episode drew just over 770,000 viewers and earned a 0.15 with adult audiences 18-49 (A18-49), the second episode saw an uptick in audience engagement, drawing 1.36 million viewers and garnering a 0.27 A18-49 rating. For the show’s concluding chapter, writers and producers split the season into three parts, breaking apart 24 episodes into 8 episode blocks. Part one ran from August to October in 2021 and part two aired earlier this year from February to April. So far, the current season’s episodes have attracted 1.72 million viewers and earned a 0.43 A18-49 rating on average. While these numbers aren’t necessarily meager, they pale in comparison to the colossal attention captured by The Walking Dead in seasons past. For example, season 4 (2013-2014) clocked in a massive 13.33 million total viewers per episode on average. Season 5, running from 2014-2015, did even better, averaging about 14.38 million viewers per episode. These hikes in viewership were also manifest in younger audiences, with seasons 4 and 5 earning average ratings of 6.8 and 7.36 A18-49 respectively. While die hard fans may be sad to see it go, the show’s long and arduous decline in ratings begs the question, if the end was always inevitable, should it have come sooner? The Walking Dead follows a group of survivors navigating the horrific, post-apocalyptic fall out of a Zombie virus. The show is based on the comic series of the same name written by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, and Charlie Adlard.

The Walking Dead was created by Frank Darabont (Mob City, The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones), the Oscar nominated screenwriter behind The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption. Miranda Kang (The 100, Spartacus) is the showrunner for the eleventh season. Long-time cast members include Norman Reedus (The Boondock Saints, Blade II) as Daryl, Melissa McBride (The Happys, The Reconstruction of William Zero) as Carol, Lauren Cohen (The Boy, The Vampire Diaries) as Maggie, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Watchmen, Rampage) as Negan. The cast also includes Christian Serratos (Twilight, Selena: The Series), Seth Gilliam (Starship Troopers, Teen Wolf), Khary Payton (Invincible, Teen Titans Go!), Ross Marquand (Avengers: Endgame, Robot Chicken), and Josh McDermitt (Retired at 35, Sharkdog). The Walking Dead airs on AMC at 9:00 PM EST/PST. 

Streaming: Netflix’s new hour-long drama The Midnight Club offers a coming of age story that seeps its protagonists into a horror-scape — a formula that earned the series a top spot on the most watched chart within days of its release. After its debut, the series managed to accrue over 18 million hours viewed in just three days. During the week of Oct. 10 to Oct. 16, its first full week on Netflix, the series raked in 49.87 million hours of viewership and became the third most popular show on the streaming platform. While the show’s strong initial performance may indicate the makings of an audience hit in terms of sheer viewership, a quick glimpse at Rotten Tomatoes brings some layers of nuance to an analysis of the series’ popularity. While The Midnight Club earned an 87% on the Tomatometer across 46 critic ratings, it only managed to garner a 57% audience score with over 300 users responding. Undoubtedly, the show owes some of its fresh out of the gate audience appeal to its status as an adaptation of Christopher Pike’s 1994 novel of the same name as well as the subsequent book series that followed it. The narrative follows a group of eight teenage hospice patients who gather at midnight to tell each other scary stories. With ratings up in the air, only time will tell whether The Midnight Club can muster its way into a second coming. If they strike gold with this new iteration, it’ll mean striking the delicate balance between capturing modern audiences new to the story while courting existing fans of the book in their portrayal. 

The Midnight Club was created by Mike Flanagan (Midnight Mass, The Haunting of Hill House) and Leah Fong (Once Upon a Time, The Magicians). Flanagan’s previous work in horror includes screenwriting credits for Ouija: Origin of Evil, Hush and Oculus. Additionally, he is the creator and executive producer of Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor. Flanagan serves as the showrunner for the show along with his frequent collaborator, producer Trevor Macy. The cast includes Iman Benson (#BlackAF, Alexa & Katie), Igby Rigney (Midnight Mass, F9: The Fast Saga), Annarah Cymone (Midnight Mass, Caged), William Chris Sumpter (Power, NYC Dreams), Aya Furukawa (The Terror, Brand New Cherry Flavor) and newcomers Ruth Codd, Adia, and Sauriyan Sapkota. All ten episodes of The Midnight Club are available to stream on Netflix. 

International: In its sixth week on Netflix, Studio Dragon’s Little Women became the third most watched non-English language show with global audiences watching almost 25 million hours in the week of Oct. 10 alone. This most recent tally marks a continuation in the upward trend the series has witnessed in viewership levels over the previous two weeks. In its fourth week on the viewership chart, the show raked in 18.94 millions hours of watch time and became the fifth most popular non-English show on Netflix. In its fifth week, it yielded 23.58 hours viewed, becoming the third most watched non-English language show. In total, the series has amassed over 105 million hours of audience engagement on the streaming platform. Given its performance so far on viewership charts, Little Women is likely to sustain its grasp on the attention of international audiences for weeks to come. 

The early September release of Little Women on Netflix coincided with its scheduled airing on South Korea’s tvN on Saturday and Sunday nights during the 9:10 PM KST time slot from Sept. 3 to Oct. 9. Set in modern day South Korea, Little Women is a loose adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 American novel of the same name. The series follows three tightly-knit poor sisters who are mysteriously implicated in the disappearance of 70 billion won and must subsequently face off against Korea’s wealthiest family. Kim Go-eun (A Muse, Guardian: The Lonely and Great God), Nam Ji-hyun (100 Days My Prince, Suspicious Partner), and Park Ji-hu (House of Hummingbird, All of Us Are Dead) lead the cast as the Oh sisters at the center of the conflict. 

Little Women was directed by Kim Hui-won (Vincenzo, Crash Landing on You). The series was written by celebrated screenwriter Jeong Seo-kyeong (Mother, Decision to Leave). A frequent collaborator of acclaimed director Park Chan-wook, Jeong won Best Screenplay at the Sitges Film Festival for Park’s 2009 film, Thirst, and Best Adapted Screenplay at the CFCA Awards for Park’s 2016 film, The Handmaiden. The cast includes Wi Ha-jun (Squid Game, Bad and Crazy), Uhm Ji-won (Hope, Missing Woman), Um Ki-joon (The Penthouse: War in Life, Ghost), Kang Hoon (Red Sleeve, You Are My Spring), Jeon Chae-eun (The Devil Judge, If You Wish Upon Me), Park Bo-kyung (Hospital Playlist, Link: Eat, Love, Kill). Each installment of the family-meets-legal drama ranges between 67 to 82 minutes. All twelve episodes of Little Women are available to stream on Netflix.