Ratings: ‘Criminal Minds’ rises for Morgan exit; ‘Heartbeat,’ ‘Arrow’ season 4 fall hard

The late March ratings woes for a variety of primetime shows are continuing, and admittedly many of them make us rather sad given that these are shows we love. Even though some of them are already renewed like “Arrow,” we want to see them succeed!

We’ll get back to that in a minute; for now, let’s just cycle through how many individual programs performed on the day.

The good news – With it being very clear that something big was happening on “Criminal Minds,” the show generated its best rating of the season in a 2.1 in the 18-49 demographic. Will many of those people stick around without Shemar Moore in the cast? That’s hard to say. The only other scripted show on the night to improve was “Rosewood” (1.0), which at least had a slight boost prior to “Empire” returning next week.

While “Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders” did fall slightly in its second episode, a 1.5 and a tiny decrease is still a win in our books. Any show that keeps more than 90% of its premiere audience has a shot at sticking around.

The bad news – Let’s begin with “Heartbeat” (0.9), which is already close to being DOA after falling more than 30% from its premiere Tuesday. It’s lower than “The Mysteries of Laura” was, and that show had an established audience. Meanwhile, “Arrow” (0.7) also shockingly fell to its lowest rating of the season, and we’re assuming that this is mostly a function of people not knowing it was on (though to be fair, the series has had some problems since early on in season 3).

Some other notable declines include “Chicago PD” (down to a 1.3) and “Supernatural” (down to a 0.6). Let’s hope for some sort of a recovery for some of these shows next week.

We’ll of course be back tomorrow with more ratings over here; meanwhile, sign up right away to get some further TV news on everything we cover, sent right over to you via our official CarterMatt Newsletter. (Photo: CBS.)