I feel like a good, solid way to measure audience engagement is how well your show's wikipedia page is being updated with relevant information, especially episode synopses. If you have a solid viewership, someone's bound to feel responsible for making regular updates to catalogue the events of each episode's plot, right?
Like, okay, let me demonstrate: I was genuinely intrigued by the Amazon Prime series Carnival Row. Love a good murder mystery and won't say no to a Victorian era urban fantasy aesthetic. And apparently I wasn't alone in this interest, either; here's the episode list on wikipedia for the first season. The top part at least, these synopses are quite thorough:
Now despite its visual flair, the actual show is... perhaps a bit weak. Like, have you ever read a fantasy story where it feels like the author was maybe a little too excited to make use of the slur he came up with for the fantasy race? Yeah, it has that sort of energy. All the same, it ended on a cliffhanger and season 2 was greenlit.
Season 2 then took three and a half years to get to us. Probably due to COVID, but it's still quite a bit of time to hope that people maintain their interest.
There was a graphic novel released in the interim, I think, but when ads started going out advertising it as the FINAL SEASON as though the show had been running nonstop all this time and this was a big event, it seemed like season 2 was more of a courtesy at this point. And it felt like it too, upon release, with a lot of plotlines being rushed to a conclusion and certain threads being picked up and dropped with reckless abandon.
Example: There's a big to-do made about the characters obtaining a fuckoff huge machine gun to take out the Monster Made Of Spikes And Teeth and then they just. Never actually use said machine gun. For some reason.
At any rate, it seems like the combination of the wait and the clearly rushed nature of the final season wasn't lost on the viewership, since... well, this is what the episode list looks like on that same Wikipedia page.
"Gage, why are you even thinking about this right now?" I'm glad you asked, rhetorical voice in my head. I've mentioned that I'm currently working on a rewatch of Hannibal, which famously was unable to adapt certain parts of Thomas Harris' series of novels due to the fact that MGM still owns the rights to the characters from The Silence of the Lambs. There was always some hope that perhaps the rights issues could be worked out eventually, but this never came to pass.
MGM, however, decided to make their own series titled "Clarice," which ran for a single 13-episode season back in 2021. And while Hannibal has separate Wikipedia pages for every single episode in its 3-season, 39-episode run, Clarice's episode list is entirely contained on its main 'Kipedia page. Of that list, a grand total of 4 episodes have full plot descriptions, 5 have brief synopses, and 4 don't have anything at all besides an episode title and writer/director credits.
Would You Be Shocked To Learn That Clarice Did Not Do Particularly Well, Critically?