Ratings: The Originals season 5 renewal chances improve slightly

With much of the Friday lineup for CBS off the air, there still isn’t all that much to necessary discuss when it comes to the overall ratings. Therefore, for the second straight Saturday piece we’re going to spend most of our time here instead putting the focus on how The Originals season 5 renewal chances are faring.

Last week, the show starting off with a 0.4 rating in the 18-49 demographic and slightly more than a million viewers … and this week, it more or less drew the same thing. How is this better than what it did last week? There are a couple of considerations that you need to take into place here.

1. Typically, shows tend to fall around 10-15% after the premiere. This was something that we were worried about last week after the premiere, since a further ratings drop would’ve meant that the show was in grave danger of being sent out to pasture. (It did technically drop slightly in total viewers, but only around 4%.)

2. We tend to round ratings off to the nearest tenth in the demo, so it’s not altogether apparent that the show actually improved this week in that particular measure. It didn’t double by any means, but an improvement of over 10% is rather impressive and a solid sign that the show could have some life still.

We feel like there are some out there within the TV ratings world who went ahead and ruled The Originals off as a show that would probably end going into this season, and we certainly don’t think that this is right. The CW’s executives have already said that they would like to see the show stick around, and as would we given that there’s some interesting potential to see what this show would look like in a world where The Vampire Diaries is already over. The timeline for this season is a little strange, and you’re only going to see some brief cameos from the other show, including an appearance at one point from Matt Davis.

We’ll see if the show can keep the momentum going moving into next week — there are no guarantees, but we remain hopeful that a season 5 renewal can happen.

If you missed it…

Be sure to head over here, since that is where you can see a video preview for what is going to be coming up on The Originals next. (Photo: The CW.)