The numbers are in and last night’s Zombie Simpsons snorefest was watched by a mere 7.11 million people.  That’s the second lowest number all year and brings the Season 21 average down to a mere 8.23 million viewers.  Adding insult to injury, an all new Cleveland Show came in at 7.68 million, which narrows Zombie Simpsons’ lead in their utterly meaningless contest to 5-3. 

This was also the last new Zombie Simpsons before the big 20th anniversary show in January, that one will have massive promotional hype, Spurlock’s special, and the release of the Season 20 DVDs to promote it.  However, right now Season 21 is more than 400,000 viewers, on average, behind Season 20 through the same time and number of episodes last year.  Even a massive number for the anniversary show probably won’t be enough to keep Season 21 from being the lowest rated season ever.  Huzzah.

Update 15 December: TV by the Numbers had their episode titles mixed up, they originally had a Zombie Simpsons re-run at 8:30 instead of The Cleveland Show.  This meant that it looked like The Cleveland Show had garnered the 7.68 in Family Guy‘s spot.  So the score is actually 6-2 and I don’t think the second MacFarlane spinoff has much of a chance of closing it.  Oh well.  Thanks to Simpsons Channel for having more patience in posting than I did.