It’s one thing to always be the bridesmaid and never the bride, but when you actually get bumped from bridesmaid to, I don’t know… usher, then things start to really look a bit dire. This might not be the world’s best analogy for the way Showtime’s fortunes have gone lately, but it’s not terribly far off. For years, Showtime was one of the two biggest cable network on television, second only to HBO, which always had about twice the subscribers. So while those numbers haven’t changed, Showtime’s standing temporarily did, as a report last year suggested that Starz actually surpassed the network in total viewers.

Those numbers, however, didn’t reflect certain technical aspects that demonstrate how Showtime is, in fact, still number two. While its subscription numbers hovered around 23 million viewers for a while, those have risen slightly to nearly 25 million, yet the thing that is really working on Showtime’s favor is the streaming service it launched a couple years back, which has been adding subscribers even as its cable sister has been shedding them. The one area in which Showtime can come close to keeping pace with HBO, in fact, is in this area, with almost two million subscribers — just a shade behind its competitor. That’s almost twice what Starz has, which is, at this stage of the game, more than just a pyrrhic victory. This one actually means something. At $10.99 per month (or $8.99 if one gets it as an add-on to an Amazon Prime or Hulu membership), that’s a nice amount of income into the company’s coffers to offset the conventional subscribers who continue to cut the cord.

That’s good, because Showtime kind of needs all the good news it can get. While Homeland continues to be a solid performer, it doesn’t pull in the numbers it used to, but then, the same can be said for literally every other show on the network. Yes, each and every one of them has shed viewers from one season to the next, and since none of them aside from the aforementioned Claire Danes vehicle has anywhere close to the prestige factor of pretty much any of the HBO programs, that is an extra bit of spit in Showtime’s vodka, so to speak.

Shameless enters its eighth season as the dean of Showtime’s slate, and while it has the distinction of being the most watched show on the network and also, consistently, the most critically acclaimed — thanks primarily to William H. Macy and Emmy Rossum — it also dropped about 10 percent of its viewers and averaged a shade more than 1.4 million per episode. Like all shows, those numbers go up considerably once you factor in delayed viewing — known in the industry as Live-Plus-7 — but the numbers have still declined, and since Shameless is getting more than a wee bit long in the tooth, it becomes a major source of concern. There’s only so much more story to tell there (though it was just renewed for a ninth season last week), just as there’s only so many more seasons that can be wrung out of Homeland, or Ray Donovan (its third-highest rated show), or the increasingly maudlin and cloying The Affair, which somehow continues to be renewed even though its storytelling is no longer coherent.

The Affair also has the dubious distinction of having shed the most viewers from one season to the next — just shy of 23 percent — and yet somehow, the network keeps bringing it back, no matter how indifference the general public has become. This, in essence, is Showtime’s major problem. Even when it puts on a show that wins a Golden Globe in its first season, as The Affair did, it has trouble capitalizing on that momentum and attracting new viewers. A better example is the drama Billions, which feels like it was made to win awards. Paul Giamatti and Damian Lewis star in a series about the financial world from heavyweight creators Brian Koppelman and David Levien, and it’s actually smart, engaging, dramatic, and funny, while also saying something about the world in a way that isn’t preachy or off-putting. And yet, its second season saw a drop of 20 percent from its first.

Seriously, when you look at a network’s and see it’s losing subscribers while each and every one of its the shows on its drops plenty of viewers, with the best performer only losing about nine percent of them, what else is there to do but shake one’s head and wonder, “what the heck is going on over there?” With Showtime, that’s a very good question… which brings me to Twin Peaks: The Return.

It’s unclear how much money the network spent on its Twin Peaks sequel, but whatever the figure was, it doesn’t appear to have been a great investment. The 18-part series was hardly watched at all, averaging less than 300,000 viewers per episode. Let’s say the cost of each episode was just a million bucks. If that’s the case, then the network spent more than 60 bucks per viewer on the series. That estimate is super low, of course, and there’s no way that’s actually the case, but the alternative is too fiscally horrible to even think about. Actually, now that this equation has been put down in black and white, it’s really awful even at this artificially low number, and that only hammers home the programming challenges that the network is facing.

Now, Showtime is owned by CBS, and the second quarter of this year saw the cable division’s revenue rise by 7 percent and its operating income rise 11 percent from the year before, so one could argue that’s because of a bump in subscribers who signed up to watch Twin Peaks. However, that’s still a pretty poor equation, and if those same viewers who may have signed up to watch David Lynch’s latest bit of inscrutable whimsy don’t stick around, those revenue and operating income numbers are going to drop in 2018.

Meanwhile, the Emmy-nominated series Masters of Sex and Episodes both ended this year, which is sort of okay because so few people watched either one of them — sensing a theme here? — with the former averaging about 450,000 viewers per episode, and the latter about 280,000. Unfortunately, White Famous doesn’t seem to be turning things around, given its bad reviews and altogether disappointing ratings.

Which is not to say that Showtime should abandon hope. Things aren’t quite that bad yet, and Frankie Shaw’s new Boston-set sitcom SMILF offers some breakout potential after premiering to strong reviews and solid ratings. Looking at next year’s slate, there is a new season of Homeland coming in 2018 along with a Ben Stiller-directed miniseries called Escape at Dannemora, and a darkly comedic series starring Jim Carrey called Kidding. There’s also a gritty crime drama starring Kevin Bacon called City on a Hill, which hails from acclaimed director Gavin O’Connor and executive producers Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, plus Seth Rogen and Evsan Goldberg’s Wall Street-based show Ball Street, which will star Don Cheadle and Andrew Rannells. If even one of those takes off a la Homeland, then the tide begins to turn at Showtime. If you pay any attention at all to the way things work in television, sometimes all it takes is a single show to make a difference, as it can create a ripple effect. That’s what happened with HBO and The Sopranos, AMC and Mad Men, Netflix and House of Cards, and, most recently, NBC and This Is Us.

The list could go on, but you get the point. What’s important here is that Showtime clearly recognizes that things aren’t going the way they should, and so the network brass is trying a lot of very different ideas in the hope that something sticks. Not just as on ongoing series, but in the public’s imagination. After all, Ray Donovan may have a loyal audience, but the Internet doesn’t wake up talking about it on Monday morning. Showtime needs something with the potential to become the same kind of sensation that Homeland was when it first aired, six years ago. In this day and age, that’s a very long time between monster successes, so it would be very helpful if one of the new shows listed above became just that… and soon.

For more entries in our network series, click here.

Neil Turitz is a filmmaker and journalist who has spent close to two decades working in and writing about Hollywood. Feel free to send him a tweet at @neilturitz. He’ll more than likely respond.