Ratings: ‘Pure Genius,’ ‘The Good Place’ rise on night where ‘Big Bang Theory’ wins night

Just how desperate does network TV need #TGIT back on the air? It felt really clear after looking at all of the numbers that came in from Thursday night’s lineup. Not only did a repeat of “The Big Bang Theory” win the night with a 1.9 rating in the 18-49 demographic, but it wasn’t even close. Nobody is watching the night in the numbers that they were previously, and that’s absolutely something that the networks need to fix up.

Let’s survey the rest of the field to show you how, even in spite of this sentiment, there are some minor victories.

CBS – The good news for the night goes to “Pure Genius,” which improved to a 0.9 rating. That matches the show’s best performance since early December. It may not be enough to officially secure a second season, but it does serve as a nice sign to see that the show is doing its part to stay reasonably steady in the numbers.

Without have “The Big Bang Theory” as a lead-in, the shows that followed it in “The Great Indoors” (1.4), “Mom” (1.3), and “Life in Pieces” (1.2) all fell by more than 14% in the numbers. That’s expected.

NBC – While “Superstore” was steady with a 1.2, “The Good Place” improved from its recent performance to a 1.1. We hope that it does get renewed, largely because it’s the sort of show that could easily improve once viewers have a chance to catch up on it over the summer. In some ways, its serialized nature makes it better suited for viewing on a Netflix than in a weekly medium like network TV … at least for some viewers. We’ll always prefer the network model.

“Chicago Med” (1.2) and “The Blacklist” (1.0) were even with their most-recent ratings.

Fox – “Hell’s Kitchen” continued its trend of being inexplicably strong with a 1.2 rating — this is seriously the show that will never die, even if it gets no press and airs on all sorts of odd times. The premiere of new series “My Kitchen Rules” followed this up with a 0.9. It didn’t perform terribly per se, but it’s also not the sort of rating that anyone is going to go crazy about.

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Tonight, we’ll get a chance to see a wide array of different programming, and we’ll be back soon to give you a little bit more insight on all of that — especially in terms of the ratings figures — very soon. Stay tuned!

Also, be sure to tell us what you watched last night in the comments.