Ratings Bubble Report: Can ‘Hawaii Five-0’ sink or swim moving into season 7?

“Hawaii Five-0” is by most accounts, a success story and proof that you can reboot a show that is very much still successful. However, at the same time it is also a show that is close to saying aloha to its time on CBS. The ratings are far from stellar, but it does still have a few things going for it that make it a reasonably hot commodity for the network.

So can the show find a way to stay afloat for one more year? This is something we’re going to do our best to analyze in this edition of our Ratings Bubble Report series.

The good news – Depending on how the contracts were set up here at the start of production, it’s possible that much of the cast is on the books for at least one more season. If there is not a need to renegotiate anything, that means that there would not be a huge surge in salary that the network / studio would have to pay. Also, we’re talking here about a Friday-night show that is still averaging close to nine million viewers. If CBS can find a way to further showcase that older viewers outside the 18-49 demographic are important, this show may not be in any danger at all.

The bad news – In the past three years that the show has been on Fridays, we’ve seen it average a 1.4, a little over a 1.2, and this season, close to a 1.1. Those are not substantial declines, but unfortunately the show did not have a lot of wiggle room to begin with. When you compare the “Hawaii Five-0” ratings to the majority of the other scripted shows on the network, nobody else on Monday – Friday has a lower number other than “Elementary,” which has been hit rather unfairly with constant preemptions and delays. You also have two Sunday-night shows that are worse in “CSI: Cyber” and “The Good Wife.”

Renewal prospects – Moderate. If CBS cancels “Code Black” and “CSI: Cyber,” that gives them two open spots for the fall season. That becomes three if “The Good Wife” ends, and four if they don’t bring back “The Amazing Race.” We think “Hawaii Five-0” will return on the virtue of the fact that this is not a network that likes to have a lot of holes in its schedule for new programming. With that said, we wouldn’t be shocked if season 7 is the show’s last.

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