Batwoman Hasn’t Bottomed Out Yet, Just Hit A New Low
Batwoman has had a rough run on the CW for its second season and these latest numbers show things have gone from bad to even worse.
This article is more than 2 years old
Are you watching Batwoman these days? No? Well, neither is anyone else. The show has had an all-time bad run of late and honestly, it would be surprising if we saw too much of it going forward after this season. The latest numbers aren’t even close to encouraging, and in fact, they are just downright bad. Cosmic Book News has it that last Sunday’s episode for the show was seen by fewer than 450,000 viewers. You don’t need to be a Nielsen expert to know that this is just a garbage stat for the show and continues to cast doubt about whether it can continue.
Season 2 of Batwoman faced an uphill battle from the get-go with the show going through a major overhaul in terms of story and character. But even with the changes, it wasn’t reasonable to expect the viewing numbers to completely crater. That’s been the case over the course of the season though with each episode consistently sitting in the half-million range on a week-to-week basis. When the first season debuted, the numbers were strong with 1.9 million viewers tuning in for the pilot episode. And things consistently sat over a million for the first half of the first season.
But Batwoman began seeing a dip as the first season wore on and then the Season 1 finale hit *only* 750,000 viewers, signaling that the program was losing moderate steam with its core audience. Then, between Season 1 and 2, series star Ruby Rose announced she was leaving the show due to a number of different reasons, one of them being a back injury and subsequent surgery she had in relation to filming the show. In recent episodes, the writers decided to recast Rose’s Kate Kane with actress Wallis Day, a confusing move for the show which had basically already recast the Batwoman character.
Javicia Leslie replaced Ruby Rose for Season 2 of Batwoman, marking the first time we’d seen a black actress play the part. The writers were able to weave the change into the overall narrative (no easy feat) and Season 2 debuted with some encouragement they could turn things around. Nope. It’s been pretty bad from the start with the Season 2 opener hitting fewer than 700,000 sets of eyeballs. And things have gotten progressively worse ever since with these latest viewing stats signaling we might be watching our last Batwoman episodes.
There were rumors even a few months ago that Batwoman could be canceled and that the CW and Arrowverse would be ready to move on from the character. It might be the right thing to do considering the lack of popularity in the overall story as well as the state of flux the show has been in over the short term. What the future holds for Batwoman isn’t totally clear. But it’s also probably not totally good. Even though critical reception remains well on the positive side, there just doesn’t seem to be a viewing market for the show.
