American Horror Story: Hotel debuts with scary good ratings

FX continues to score by freaking the hell out of fans of uber-producers Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk: Close to 6 million viewers tuned into the 90-minute premiere of American Horror Story: Hotel on Wednesday.

The episode earned a 3.0 rating in adults 18–49 and a total of 5.81 million viewers, according to early results from Nielsen. That’s a tiny decrease from the premiere of American Horror Story: Freak Show (3.1 rating, 6.1 million viewers) but those numbers are sure to increase once DVR usage is taken into account. Hotel ended up being the No. 2 program of the night in 18–49, behind Empire on Fox.

If you’ll recall, the premiere of Freak Show went on to become FX’s most-watched episode ever after live-plus-3 results were reviewed. 

FX doesn’t like to release official results until it gets the live-plus-three results — so the attaboys will have to wait.