Apples and oranges. Not the same audience at all. I see no reason why people who would tune in for Black Sails or even American Gods, should automatically want to watch AvED as well week after week just because they have Starz. They're completely different shows.
If that was the case, AvED wouldn't have lost as many of the viewers it had during the first season. Ratings for AvED started to drop during the second season, which coincidentally was when the show was the most problematic in the writing department and backstage creative differences disputes started having a negative effect on the show. After an inconsistent, kinda aimless second season and that atrocious finale, a lot of people gave up on the show. The ratings never really bounced back from that. In fact, they only continued to drop during the third season until they reached a stable number that just wasn't enough to convince Starz to continue. The writing certainly got a lot better during the second half of the third season, but by then it was too little too late. To say the writing and treatment of the plotlines and characters don't have anything to do with a show's ability to sustain an audience is kinda ingenuous. As Muzzlehatch said, just take a look at the discussions we had here while the show was airing and you'll see opinions were very divisive when it comes to the show's writing ever since the show started. You may not have had any problems with it, but it was far from perfect and there was no majority consensus that the show was just "fucking wonderful". Another thing that certainly adds to all of that is that the concept, format and narrative style of AvED was always better suited for binge watching. The short running time per episode and purposeful lack of meaningful character development didn't really reward audiences for tuning in week after week. The show would've been better off and have a better fighting chance on Netflix rather than Starz right from the start.
Yea, I guess you're right. In my opinion, Season 2 was firing on all cylinders. Though, I did initially feel it was too jokey the first time I watched it, but that was a very minor criticism while I enjoyed the hell out of it. But watching it all now, it's the series at it's peak.
The main thing is that pretty much no one sees things my way. To me, you can't judge a season until it's over (pertaining to writing). I see a season as a whole that can start out with a lot of questions and make sense when you see the whole picture. Then again, I would never watch live because I care too much about it. I always wait until it's over (the season at least) until watching it all.
Of course, if I were a Nielsen viewer, I would have it marked as 'watched live'.
Full disclosure, I actually was a Nielsen viewer and would have been during the run of Season 3, though I didn't have Starz, so it didn't matter. I opted out of Nielsen because it was no longer writing in what one was watching, you had to acquiesce to a 1984 style listening device that constantly has a cell-phone-like signal where they basically listen to everything in your home. It's absolutely fucking disturbing and only an idiot would agree to that. They send you this box to plug in and it listens to you (and your TV) and is basically a cell-phone radiating you. So you get cancer and spied on. You have to sign these forms agreeing to this (I still have them). They claim, "The listening device doesn't listen to you, it's listening for special decoded sounds your TV gives off that only it can hear and can't be heard by humans." Wow.
So all Nielsen viewers are the kind that don't mind a constant radiated signal directed right at them and don't mind an organization listening and recording all sound in their home. Facebook kind of people that give out all their info and images for the world to see.
Well, that was my little rant about how totally fucked TV-viewing measurement has become. You thought it was bad and unfair before... While listening to exactly what you are (doing) watching, it's inclusive only to idiots that question nothing.
But we do have Netflix and online downloads now, so that's the opposite (correct) direction in counting viewership.
