“Mr. Robot” may be a hit with Emmy voters, but it still has some work to do to win over audiences.
The USA drama’s second season kicked off to a soft 0.4 rating among adults 18-49 Wednesday, according to Nielsen overnight numbers, down one tenth of a point from last year’s series premiere. In total viewers, the drop-off was more severe. The season-two premiere drew 1.04 million viewers, down 41% from the series debut. Those numbers tied the series low in the demo and represented a new series low in total viewers, though they are expected to rise in multi-platform and delayed viewing.
The super-sized season-two bow, which ran from 10 p.m. to 11:30 p.m., received a big marketing push from USA. On Sunday, the cable channel surprised fans by making the first hour of the premiere available to view for a limited time on social-media platforms, including Twitter, Snapchat and YouTube.
“Mr. Robot” drew six Primetime Emmy Award nominations Thursday, including one for best drama series and another for lead actor Rami Malek. The show has, since its premiere last year, been a hit with critics. In her review of the first two episodes of season two for Variety, Sonia Saraiya wrote, “the show remains an artfully constructed receptacle for our cyber-paranoia, whether directed at the government, or capitalism, or technology, or most pressingly, one’s ability to betray oneself, with hallucinations or selective memory or — worst of all — a self-serving notion of the right thing to do.”
