NCIS season 19 premiere ratings down; NCIS: Hawaii fares okay

For the first Monday of the 2021-22 TV season, most of our questions were geared around the NCIS season 19 premiere and understandably so. We’re talking about a show that, for years, has been hyped for having more viewers than any other.

Yet, CBS made a controversial move at the end of last season in shifting it to Mondays. They decided to shift from what worked in favor of a three-hour FBI programming block. The jury is still out on whether or not that will work but so far, we’d say that the NCIS change is producing a little bit of mixed results.

NCIS premiere video! If you look below, you can see everything we had to say about the big episode. Once you watch, you also need to SUBSCRIBE to Matt & Jess on YouTube — there are some more updates coming throughout the rest of season 19 and you won’t want to miss them!

Overall, last night’s “Blood in the Water” generated over 8.1 million live viewers and a 0.7 rating in the 18-49 demographic. It was the most-watched show of the night (great news!), but it was also down more than 20% in both measures from the start of season 18. You can probably attribute some of this to the move, especially since the show is now airing opposite Monday Night Football and it never had to deal with that before. However, it’s fair to assume it would’ve declined slightly even in its old Tuesday timeslot this fall; there’s a natural erosion when it comes to network TV shows of around 10-15% every season.

As for NCIS: Hawaii, it generated for its premiere a 0.5 rating and more than 6.3 million viewers. We’d say that this is an okay start to the Vanessa Lachey series, but the future here will be dependent more on how it fares in subsequent weeks. The one thing that gives us some anxiety is that the early reviews are mixed for the new show; does that mean that we could see a big drop moving into episode 2? We have to be prepared for that.

Related – Check out more news on NCIS, including a promo for episode 2

What did you think about the NCIS season 19 premiere?

Also, what do you think about the first ratings? Be sure to share right now in the attached comments! Once you do that, stick around for some other news that you don’t want to miss. (Photo: CBS.)

This article was written by Jess Carter. Be sure to follow her on Twitter.