Ratings Progress Report: Is ‘Quantico’ worthy of graduation, or of flunking out?

Going into the fall season, there were few other fall series that carried with them the sort of expectation or promotion that “Quantico” did. While this series is not executive-produced by Shonda Rhimes, there are many elements that give it a #TGIT feel: A strong female lead in Priyanka Chopra, a diverse and interesting cast, and a storyline that allows for one stunning twist after another to take place.

So has the show echoed #TGIT at all in the ratings? As we will show you in this new edition of our Ratings Progress Report series, there are some things that “Quantico” can hang its hat on for the time being. However, at the same time there are some trouble spots in recent weeks that show a little bit of long-term concern that could cause the show to meet an early exit.

The good news – Overall this season, the series is averaging over a 1.6 rating in the key 18-49 demographic, the measure that matters the most to advertisers. This is only slightly below “Once Upon a Time” in terms of Sunday nights on ABC, and the only 10:00 p.m. series doing better right now is a Rhimes entry, the Pete Nowalk-created “How to Get Away with Murder.” The show is drawing some viewers and attention, and doing so in a difficult timeslot opposite “Sunday Night Football” and “Talking Dead.” We don’t think that anyone has that enormous of expectations for this spot, and “Quantico” is doing far and away better so far than “Revenge” was at this point last season. This has long been a trouble spot for the network, so if they can even establish relative consistency here, they will be happy.

Also worth noting is that “Quantico” is a steady performer in live+3 and live+7 data, which is at least being considered in renew / cancel decisions.

The bad news – For the first few weeks, it looked like the show was actually keeping almost all of its audience around. Then, something changed almost on a dime. Within the past two weeks the show has lost over 25% of its demo audience, and the November 1 episode (1.2) had lost more than a third of the audience the show had in the premiere. Granted, there is a caveat here in that it was up against a particularly big NFL game and also the finale game of the World Series. It may be better right now to look at this as an outlier, and for the sake of the show, you have to hope that it is.

The one thing the show itself may need to work on here is trying to bring more answers to Alex’s story about quickly. This is an era of options, and people are not going to be so patient as to wait around to see what you are doing when they can just go watch something else.

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