Ratings: ‘Timeless’ starts okay; ‘Conviction’ bad on arrival; ‘Scorpion’ season 3 premieres down

We were very excited to see what the numbers were going to be for many network shows on Monday night, and as a whole, we’d classify them as a slightly disappointing affair after looking at some of the preliminary ratings.

The good news – For “Timeless,” at least it can claim for one week that it is #1 in the 18-49 demographic with a 1.9 rating for the premiere. If it were to stay that way all season we’d argue that this is a fairly sizable hit for NBC that could go on for many seasons. The problem is that we don’t quite see that, even if most of the reaction we’ve seen on social media to the pilot is positive and we rather enjoyed it — at least as much as one can a pilot.

Elsewhere, “Dancing with the Stars” drew a 1.7 on the night, a nice increase versus the prior episode of the show. “The Big Bang Theory” was down slightly, but a 3.4 that qualifies as #1 for the night is still a win in our books.

The bad news – Tough news for “Conviction,” which may be as close to being dead on arrival as a show we’ve seen this season. Despite a good lead-in it mustered just a 1.0 rating in the demo, which suddenly makes “Castle” ratings for its final season a little more understandable. We don’t think the show was helped much by some not-great reviews, and unfortunately Hayley Atwell just cannot find that starring vehicle that really works for her in generating great numbers.

Some of the following shows were also down versus previous outings: “Gotham” (1.0), “Kevin Can Wait” (2.4), and “Lucifer” (1.1). “Scorpion” averaged a 1.8 over its two-hour premiere, and while that’s very good given the timeslot, it is a pretty big drop from how it started season 2. We cannot ignore year-to-year comparison.