Ratings: Has Claire Holt’s departure killed ‘The Originals’? Also, ‘NCIS,’ ‘New Girl’ low

How badly are ratings hurt by the departure of a star? This is something that we are going to look at in this new ratings piece, given how interesting these things are to examine at this time of year.

We’ll start here by saying that most of this is a discussion for the long-term future of these shows, given that they are all renewed already for another season and there is nothing immediately to worry about with them.

(Update: In the final numbers released today, all three shows improved their numbers by 0.1 in the demo. This is slightly better than we make it sound below, but it is not enough of a change to make anything we say irrelevant.)

“The Originals” – Since losing Claire Holt (who will likely return at some point), the numbers for the CW show have been cut by at least 25%. Its 0.6 rating in the 18-49 demographic is a series low, and down from the show’s last series low it scored for the previous new episode.

The positive here is that this is still a 50% improvement of a comparable April CW broadcast from last year on a Tuesday. (We are using April 24, since that is a night featuring new episodes.) You can blame this also on spring and natural viewer erosion, but given that “The Vampire Diaries” has never fallen this low, there may be smoke here to the theory that less Rebekah equals less viewership.

“NCIS” – This is one that we’ve been asked about a lot: Has Cote de Pablo’s exit led to terrible ratings for the show? The answer here is fairly complicated.

When it comes to demo ratings, the show has been hurt badly this year. It scored a 2.1 last night, which is a solid 25% drop from the 2.8 it had for April 23 of last year. What is interesting about this, though, is that it has only lost 600,000 viewers year-to-year (16.7 million vs. 17.3 million), and that is a less than 5% drop that is actually pretty good for a show in its 11th season. Also, the demo ratings for “NCIS: Los Angeles” are down just about as much year-to-year, and the demo ratings for “The Voice” are down over 30%.

It’s possible that there is a contingent of unhappy Cote fans not watching and hurting ratings, but it feels like more than anything else with both this show and “NCIS: Los Angeles” is just that their average viewer is getting older, and not counting in the demo anymore. It seems far more unlikely that there are many young viewers who bailed on the show, and then suddenly an influx of older viewers who have suddenly decided to watch. We know that we’re looking here at specific dates, but these dates track consistently in the episodes a week before and after.

What they need to be doing is find more ways to bring in the 18-49 audience. We don’t like the ageism that exists in TV advertising, but that’s the reality of the business. Out of the three shows sampled here, “The Voice” is actually the only one to lose close to 10% of its viewer count vs. 2013. They’re all just starting to age.

“New Girl” – Let’s spend a second talking about another interesting phenomenon: A show being hurt by people getting together. Nick and Jess dating siphoned away the show’s audience, though having terrible lead-ins hasn’t helped. A repeat of the show on April 23 of last year (1.2) actually fared better than a new episode on April 15, 2014 (1.1). This is a clear example of a creative change hurting a series, and there is no other way to look at it. While there are DVR viewers, you’re not doing something right if you cannot get them to watch live.