Sunday ratings update: Instinct, American Idol, Timeless, Deception

Going into Sunday night we absolutely had a lot of different ratings-related questions. For starters, would Instinct prove to be a big hit, would American Idol keep most of its premiere audience, and would Timeless continue to fight hard for a renewal? These are the three shows that are the main focus of this particular ratings piece, so let’s go ahead and dive into this a little bit further with them in mind.

Instinct – The new CBS series featuring Alan Cumming is subject to adjustments due to NCAA programming, but for now it premiered to a 1.0 rating in the 18-49 demographic. While far from a smash hit, that could be enough to keep it around for a while if most of the rating holds from one week to the next. The only issue that could come up here is that new shows very rarely retain the majority of their audience from the premiere. We enjoyed the premiere for the most part but it does clearly still have some room to grow. We’ll see if it does that.

American Idol – While down more than 20% from the premiere, we imagine that ABC is going to be reasonably satisfied with how the show fared. The question now is rather simple: Can the network keep this up into the live shows? This rating would meet some of the network’s expectations and, to go along with that, hopefully help to fund the show in the future. The biggest roadblock that this show, time and time again, is going to encounter is just how much money that it’s handing over to some of its on-air talent. The judges are pretty good to date, but we also don’t think there is any one contestant who is going viral in a way in which the show could’ve hoped.

Timeless – Next up is the time-traveling NBC show, which kept most of its premiere but slid slightly down to a 0.7 rating. This is about as far down as the show can go without making us start to really sweat. We don’t think expectations are super-high given the timeslot, but this is a show that does need need to perform to a relative degree in live+same-day figures. Hopefully, it can figure out a way to do just that.

Related – Read our review for Sunday night’s new Timeless episode

There is probably a little bit less when it comes to major ratings headlines going into Monday night, largely because there aren’t any premieres. We are still interested in seeing how the next new episode of The Good Doctor fares, though, given that we are so close to the finale.

Be sure to share some of what you think about these new ratings right now in the attached comments!

Also, you can like CarterMatt on Facebook now in the event you do want to get some other insight when it comes to all of the shows mentioned here. (Photo: CBS.)