Ratings: Did Lethal Weapon, The Gifted finales help renewal prospects?
Is there a better chance of a Lethal Weapon season 4 or The Gifted season 3 thanks to the ratings from last night? That’s what CarterMatt is going to be diving into with today’s ratings breakdown from Tuesday night. One night of ratings isn’t often enough to move mountains, but the general assumption is that finales are where audience enthusiasm should be at a peak. After all, don’t you want to watch live to avoid spoilers? If you really love a show, that seems to be the thing that makes the most sense.
New Lethal Weapon and The Gifted videos
After you check out our report on the numbers for these episodes, we suggest that you also check out our videos below! In these, we discuss the future for both The Gifted and Lethal Weapon in-depth. If you want to make sure you’re up-to-date on these shows moving forward, we suggest that you subscribe to CarterMatt on YouTube.
Lethal Weapon – It makes the most sense to go here in chronological order, so why not kick things off with the possible final salvo for Damon Wayans as Roger Murtaugh — as well as everyone else in the cast. The finale last night drew a 0.7 rating in the all-important 18-49 demographic, down slightly versus the 0.8 the week prior. It’s still right in line with the show’s mediocre season 3 average, so you can’t really look at this and go “oh, the show’s for sure getting renewed because of this.” There’s no real change and there was no real enthusiasm-bump.
You can argue that heavy competition elsewhere was a factor here — while there was no new episode of The Flash on the air, Lethal Weapon did battle against The Voice for the first time in 2019 last night. Here’s a completely random stat for you (hey, networks do sometimes cherrypick ratings stats for press releases) — even though it was down versus last week, the Lethal Weapon finale was the highest-rated episode to air opposite The Voice since the second one this season back in October. Maybe that’s your silver lining.
The Gifted – Meanwhile, there’s a small bit of good news to report on when it comes to the X-Men show … the numbers are slightly up for the finale! While on paper, the 0.5 rating in the 18-49 demographic is about equal to the most recent episode, the demo viewership is actually up about 10%. It’s not enough to make much of a splash (obviously, since it rounds off to the same rating), but it’s still worth noting. It’s also worth mentioning that The Gifted is up almost 5% in total viewers to close to 1.7 million … not that this is enough to make a big difference.
Here’s where the situation with The Gifted still remains — many of the non-MCU Marvel properties seem to be vanishing into a void due to the Disney – Fox merger. In due time, the Disney team wants to control their own narrative on X-Men after not being able to for decades. Legion is ending and we’re not exactly hearing a lot of plans about the future of the film franchise. If The Gifted was getting the ratings of The Masked Singer, maybe they’d overlook some of this and keep the show on the air. Yet, it’s not even getting a fourth of the live demo viewership of The Masked Singer. Maybe someone needs to dress Stephen Moyer up in a funny costume so he can sing karaoke to the True Blood theme song.