Will ‘Supergirl’s’ premiere bring CBS to new ratings heights?

There’s no escaping “Supergirl” today. If you look around the internet, you will see ads for the CBS series on almost every turn. The character is a huge gamble for a network that is not used to taking gambles; in the past, they would be more than content with making Kara Zor-El a detective for the NYPD who occasionally shows superpowers in order solve crimes.

So what exactly does the network expect from Monday’s premiere? When analyzing ratings, we feel like personally “Supergirl” is one of the biggest unknowns. Almost no one has a clear idea as to how the show will fare.

The one thing that we will say is that it feels extremely unlikely that this show is going to match the premiere numbers of “Empire” last season, or even a smaller but still major hit in “How to Get Away with Murder.” Superheroes are much more played-out as a concept, even if few of them on TV have the mass-market appeal of Supergirl. You have a familiar brand, and a marketing campaign that has pushed really hard to appeal to young women and apparently also Jeb Bush.

We feel like the best-case scenario for the show is that it draws a 3.0 rating in the 18-49 demographic and around 8 or 9 million viewers. It’ll certainly premiere better than the recent hero shows on The CW, but we just don’t see anything in this genre getting anything close to the 4.7 rating that “Agents of SHIELD” had with its premiere a little over two years ago. That was a different climate, and it had the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a promotional tool.

Ultimately, our expectation is something in the 2.5 range in the demo, with the low end being around a 2.1 or so. The show has the misfortune of airing against “Gotham,” which could hurt both shows. It also has the liability of having a pilot that was leaked a long time ago. That may make it more difficult to read into just how many viewers the show gets tonight.

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