Ratings: ‘Empire’ episode 10 finally falls; ‘American Idol,’ ‘CSI: Cyber’ defy Daylight Savings Time

It was the ultimate showdown on Wednesday night. In one corner, you had recent ratings champion “Empire.” In the other corner, you had the destroyer of worlds known as Daylight Savings Time. Shows routinely fall more than 5% in the week that follows the clocks jumping forward, either because people want to enjoy the sunshine, or because they seriously don’t want to act like time changed at all and they are a little behind.

For this battle, the time change stood victorious … to an extent. “Empire” still did very well, but it may be close to hitting its natural peak, anyway. With a 5.6 rating in the 18-49 demographic, the show slid slightly from last week’s epic series high of 5.8. This is the first time in the past almost two months where the show actually dropped from one week to the next. It could rise next week for the two-hour finale, but the earlier time will probably hurt the first hour to a certain extent.

There were still some victors against the time change last night. For example, “American Idol” rose to a 2.3 for its top 12 reveal, which is a good sign that the show has found a decent audience for itself this year. It’s not the show that it once was, but Fox will be happy if the numbers are around here the entire season.

Meanwhile, “CSI: Cyber” kept the entire 1.8 rating it had last week, which is doubly impressive given that this is the follow-up to a premiere and it is after Daylight Savings Time. It’s possible it could adjust down in the final ratings (this sometimes happens with 10:00 p.m. shows), but even still this is looking better than “Stalker.”

Since we’re getting near crunch time for shows to renew / cancel their favorites (“Empire” is already coming back), we’ll have more of these updates soon.