Both have fallen off a cliff in relation to potential audience for a variety of reasons and the only real meaning in the figures now seems to be relative to other shows on the night and in the same week. Last time I looked NCIS was wiping the floor with most of its competition on the night and holding up pretty strong over the entire week. Even the re-runs were holding up strong against the competition. In the demo it seems rare for any show to beat a 2 now, although one or two dramatically bucked the trend.

Have Neilsen achieved anything in taking other metrics into consideration to create these figures yet?

That said, I think your predictions are realistic. It will be interesting to see how they stack up.

In addition to the age of the show, I think it has paid for having a stable cast for so many years – longer than the run of many shows – and once that stability was finally broken it’s been hard to maintain the continuity.