Ratings: ‘Mistresses’ season 4 surges; ‘BrainDead’ stumbles; ‘The Bachelorette’ tops ‘American Ninja Warrior’

The ratings have come in from Monday night, and there’s good news for “Mistresses”: It really does help when you’re not airing on the 4th of July, and also when you’ve got a good lead-in!

The latest installment of the ABC series drew a much improved 0.8 rating in the 18-49 demographic, and while we’re not sure that this spares the show from getting canceled down the line, you can at least think of it for now as a temporary reprieve of sorts from the freefall it was looking at a week ago.

It’s too bad that the news wasn’t so great elsewhere. Given that it drew just a 0.4 rating in the demo, it’s almost a surprise CBS is keeping “BrainDead” on the air. One interesting thing about it, though, is that it is actually getting some viewership. It’s just skewing extremely old along the way. With 3.17 million people watching, it had a higher total than “Mistresses” (3.11), and also over half of that for “American Ninja Warrior” (6.19 million). The big difference there is that “Ninja Warrior” skews pretty young and posted a 1.7, and demo ratings do matter more than any other measure for major networks.

“The Bachelorette” was once again the big winner of the night with a 1.9 rating, though this was a drop from the most-recent episode and likely a sign that the irregular scheduling for the show this season has hurt it in some way.

One other interesting tidbit is that the first live show for “So You Think You Can Dance” drew a 0.7 rating on the same day that Fox offered up a live stream to viewers who verified their cable subscription. We do wonder if that takes a chunk away from people watching on TV, but we don’t imagine it being significant.