NCIS: New Orleans ratings remained even on Oct. 23 while lurking behind the rest of the CBS lineup. See the latest NCIS: New Orleans numbers.
While other CBS shows saw their ratings lift significantly this week, NCIS: New Orleans stayed the course in what’s been a slow but steady Season 6.
Tuesday’s episode “Spies and Lies” was the show’s attempt at a spy thriller, with a Naval officer sure that his girlfriend was actually an undercover agent. It was also notable for being directed by LeVar Burton (Star Trek: The Next Generation).
The installment had 6.72 million people watching live. That constitutes a minor lift from last week’s audience of 6.62 million (+0.10, or 100,000).
However, it’s still less of an audience than the show had two weeks ago. That’s where things get a little muddled for the youngest of the NCIS spinoffs.
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“Spies and Lies” had enough viewership to be ranked sixth amongst the 14 programs on broadcast TV on Oct. 22, which is still a pretty good number; it’s not Top 5 but it’s just outside. So it’s not as if Season 6 is a total disaster.
But its share amongst the coveted adults 18-49 demographic was only good enough to tie it for ninth place, which is definitely not great. The 0.7 mark had it even with ABC‘s sitcoms Black-ish and its spinoff Mixed-ish. That’s in the bottom half of broadcast shows this Tuesday.
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And then there’s the elephant in the room, which is that NCIS: New Orleans is well behind the other two CBS crime dramas that air ahead of it. Its parent program has a live audience in double digits, and FBI is currently hitting the high 8 million range.
That then makes New Orleans the unintentional weak link, a good million-plus viewers behind its lead-in. Its audience on its own is just fine (many shows would kill for 6 million people to be tuned in live), but by comparison, it’s clearly missing a step. So will CBS take it on its own merits, or does it have to perform as well as the shows it’s surrounded by?
NCIS: New Orleans ratings continue to be better than its direct competition at 10 p.m. (although ABC mixed things up this week by airing an ABC News special rather than Emergence, so that fact is skewed for Oct. 23). But with an eye toward Season 7, it would be nice to see the series pick up some extra eyeballs to get it more on pace with the rest of the Tuesday night lineup.
NCIS: New Orleans gets the night off next week, along with the rest of CBS’s regular primetime lineup. Will it continue to bring up the rear, literally and figuratively, when it returns?