Ratings: ‘Law & Order: SVU,’ ‘Chicago PD’ tumble without ‘The Voice’; ‘Empire’ season 2 up (11/19/2015)
This just in: Shows air better when “The Voice” is put on before them. Think of this as the understatement of the year as we get into our ratings update for the day.
The winners – The clear one at the moment is “Empire,” which recovered and rose to a 4.4 rating in the 18-49 demographic, and then also “Arrow” recovering to a 1.0. Neither show had substantial changes, but at the moment any good news is news. We imagine that following tonight, the majority of the shows will start to experience declines due to the Thanksgiving holidays. Therefore, it’s going to be hard to see many shows sort of filter into the “winners” category.
The losers – While we’d say that “Law & Order: SVU” (1.4) and “Chicago PD” (1.4) did not put up horrible numbers, they were off significantly from when they had a better lead-in than “The Mysteries of Laura.” What this does show to us is in a way still more of the power that this show has to generate numbers no matter what it is around on the schedule. It is the sort of show you can put after a hit, and it will retain those numbers very well.
There’s not too much else to report beyond of course the stunning decline of “Criminal Minds” (1.5) this season. Remember when this show was consistently getting a 2.0? It really wasn’t that long ago. We feel like “SVU” has carved out an audience for itself still in spite of the “Empire” competition, but for one reason or another, the folks over at the CBS procedural are still struggling to do just that. There weren’t too many other big declines elsewhere.
(Photo: NBC.)
Michael Goldman
November 21, 2015 @ 8:51 pm
For all the talk about the decline of Criminal Minds, it still leads SVU 6-1-1 in the head to head competition when both have new episodes. In the meantime, the only time SVU beat Criminal Minds was when The Voice was the 8 pm lead in, not The Debacle(Mysteries of Laura) was on. How can MOL brag about having supposedly 7.6 million viewers when it’s only doing a 1.1? Don’t more viewers mean higher ratings? Not in the case of MOL, which is averaging a little over a 1.1 for 8 episodes. It’s hurting SVU and CHICAGO PD. Someone said MOL is in a bad timeslot. As soon as The Player is finished, move MOL to the Thursday 10 pm slot for its remaining 8 episodes. At least it can’t hurt SVU and CHICAGO PD over there.