Do NCIS hiatuses have major impact on ratings?
Regrettably, there is no new installment coming on the network tonight and more than that, there is no installment coming the following week either. CBS is forcing you to wait until we get to Tuesday, February 27 in order for the series to return with new episodes, and it’s going to be a big one for a couple of different reasons. For starters, French Stewart is returning as Paul Triff, a notorious villain from the past who has ties to McGee’s apartment. Meanwhile, to go along with that this episode also brings you the return of Gabriel Hicks. Hicks is currently out in the wind, and for the time being he is the most dangerous adversary that the NCIS team is facing this season. He is sly, he is smart, and he is able to lie and concoct stories like nobody’s business. His main calling card right now is finding a way to properly outsmart both Fornell and Gibbs, something that is not altogether easy to do.
One of the questions that you should be really wondering here in turn is whether or not there are going to be fewer viewers tuning in to watch the remainder of this story when NCIS returns to the air — isn’t it possible that long hiatuses hurt ratings? We absolutely have seen many examples in the past of it doing so. We just don’t think that it plays all to major of a role in this case, largely due to the fact that NCIS is a procedural that doesn’t require viewers to keep track of what is going on in the story most of the time. You can miss a couple of episodes of the show, pop back in, and still have a reasonably good understanding as to what is going on.
Related – Check out CarterMatt’s first teases on NCIS season 15 episode 15
Also, if NCIS was the sort of show that was to lose viewers every time that it went off the air, it would have almost certainly been canceled at this point. If the numbers decline at all on the other side of this, it may just be because there is a smaller overall pool of viewers watching because of warmer temperatures.