Ratings: ‘The Amazing Race’ premiere lukewarm; ‘Shark Tank’ up; ‘Second Chance’ falls more

Did CBS really get some bigger ratings as a result of their new “Amazing Race” experiment? We know that they really thought bringing in some social-media stars would be a huge boost to their ratings, but after looking at the preliminary numbers, that’s not exactly the case.

As a matter of fact, Friday night was a pretty poor night in TV ratings as a whole … with there being one pretty clear exception.

The winners – “Shark Tank” surged up randomly on the night to a 1.7 rating in the 18-49 demographic, which is one of the better numbers that we’ve had a chance to see from the show as of late. Ultimately, this show is so evergreen that it can always fluctuate and be okay. We’d also say that both “Hawaii Five-0” (1.3) and “Blue Bloods” (1.4) did relatively well, as their declines versus the week before were pretty minimal.

Oh, and we suppose that we should say that “20/20” also killed it in rising up to a 1.7, but we don’t really follow the ratings of either it or “Dateline” closely, since we choose more to follow shows that actually have some chance of being canceled.

The losers – The ratings were pretty disappointing everywhere else. While “The Amazing Race” (1.2) was up from some fall episodes, it was down versus the similar premiere in February 2015. Also, “Sleepy Hollow” (0.7) and “Second Chance” (0.5) each were pummeled by some of the competition, and at the moment we’re not sure that either “The Vampire Diaries” (0.4) or “The Originals” (0.3) has stabilized ever since their move to Friday night.