Why The Blacklist season 7 ratings offer hope past season 8

It’s true that at the moment, we are still in the midst of a rather-extensive wait when it comes to more episodes of The Blacklist. It’s all but impossible to know when the show is coming back into production, let alone when it will premiere. NBC has put the series on its fall schedule … but it is a fairly-optimistic fall schedule at the moment.

For the time being, though, there is one thing we want to dive into here: The show’s surprising ratings success for season 7. You see, we’ve been conditioned over the years to think that ratings for primetime network shows are going to decline every single year as more and more people shift over into other viewing methods. However, that was not the case with the James Spader drama this past year!

Let’s break it down for a moment: The series (which ended in a fast, surprising fashion due to the global health crisis) brought in on average 4.27 million live viewers. That’s a nice little increase of over 6% from the show’s season 6 numbers. That’s not bad for a show that airs on Fridays; the numbers may have been lifted slightly from viewers staying home during the spring, but it was charting well before that. Even though season 7 was down in the 18-49 demographic versus season 6, the decline was less than 4% — the sort of retention most networks would beg for.

Does this mean that the show is going to have a chance at a season 9 down the road? We wouldn’t rule it out, but we think that the producers will spend most of their time basing this on the performance of season 8 in the early going. It’s notable that season 8 has not been announced as the final season, so there may be some early thoughts and discussions going on about this right now in the writers’ room.

Do you think that The Blacklist will give us something beyond a season 8?

Be sure to share right now in the attached comments! Meanwhile, remember here to stick around in the event you want some other news on the series. (Photo: NBC.)