Ratings: ‘Castle’ falls after Stana Katic news; ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’ finale, ‘Lucifer’ surge

From the moment that it was first announced that Stana Katic would be leaving “Castle” alongside Tamala Jones early Monday, we figured that the backlash would impact the airing of Monday night’s new episode in a significant way. That turned out to be true, but at the same time we don’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves in proclaiming it was a complete disaster either.

Overall, the Hayley-centric episode ended up drawing a 1.0 rating in the 18-49 demographic, which was down a tenth from last week and also down slightly from the season average. It is the smallest rating for the show since February, when it drew a 0.8 and a 0.9 over that two-day Valentine’s Day stretch where we had Castle in the courtroom followed by “Dead Red.”

With this show, we do figure that there will be some viewers who stick with this season to see the Beckett story out; our real question is whether or not casual viewers (i.e. the ones who aren’t on Twitter and we never hear from) would continue watching without Katic aboard. Since they’re the sort who just turn it on 15-16 times a year because they want a little escapism, we can’t answer that.

As for other ratings from the night…

The good news – “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” improved to a 0.3 for its finale. While that isn’t a huge number by any means, it is further verification that this show has a super-solid audience. It posted roughly the same rating almost the entire season. “Lucifer,” meanwhile, also rose to a 1.3 and even ended up beating “Gotham” (1.2) to be #1 on the night for Fox.

The bad news – “Supergirl” dropped down in its finale all the way to a 1.2, tying its worst outing of the season. Probably not the way you want to go out, right? At least it still has a good shot of coming back. Also, “Dancing with the Stars” (1.6) faltered with its Switch-Up week, and “NCIS: Los Angeles” (1.2) fell a little further. “Blindspot” (1.3) is also suddenly looking very vulnerable, and hardly the hit everyone thought it would be preseason.