Ratings: ‘This Is Us,’ ‘Chicago Fire’ hold up well versus World Series; ‘The Flash’ falls

When you are looking at the ratings for Tuesday night’s primetime lineup, what you’re really having to do right now is look at everything with a certain degree of context. This is a night where the shows were up against Game 6 of the World Series, and when you consider that, we consider it for the most part a miracle that many of them did as well as they did.

Let’s start with NBC and “This Is Us.” Technically, the show did slide somewhat to a 2.3 rating in the 18-49 demographic; given that most shows are experiencing declines of more than 10% with the World Series in mind, though, dropping under 5% week-to-week is incredibly impressive. We’ll even give some credit to “Chicago Fire” (1.4), even if its decline was a little more substantial in around 100%.

There are some shows who actually improved a little, in between “No Tomorrow” (0.3, its gain may not be detectable in preliminary numbers) and “Agents of SHIELD” (0.8) picking up a little bit of steam. Neither one of these shows is pulling in killer ratings by any means, but you gotta take the victories where you can.

As a reminder, there were no Fox or CBS shows on Tuesday night, so we got a little bit less to report on there than usual.

The bad news – “The Flash” fell to one of its lowest ratings to date in a 0.9. We are a little bit sympathetic about it because of the competition it faced, but at the same time, we do think that this is still notable and not great. In general, it’s been a rough season for The CW and their superhero shows so far in terms of the ratings, which is rather sad, given that “The Flash” is probably one of our five favorite shows in terms of pure enjoyment.