Chicago Fire season 6 ratings: Should fans be worried?

Chicago Fire season 6 ratings have fluctuated all season, so should fans be worried about the show’s future? We look deeper at the Chicago Fire ratings.

TV fans know that fandom is only one part of what makes a show successful. The other half is TV ratings, and Chicago Fire hasn’t been doing as well as it used to in them this season.

Coming off a season where it had the most live viewers of any One Chicago show, Fire has turned into the series that routinely lags behind Chicago PD and Chicago Med in overnight ratings.

But it’s not the same show it used to be, either. It also got moved to Thursdays from Tuesdays so NBC could leave This Is Us in its Tuesday slot, and was preempted for several weeks to make way for the network’s coverage of Thursday Night Football.

So should Fire fans be worried?

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There’s no denying that Chicago Fire season 6 has had a drop in the ratings compared to the fifth season. Last season, only one episode (“Sixty Days”) had less than 6 million live viewers.

This season, five of the first 11 episodes have come in under 6 million. That includes five of the last six episodes.

Only “Slamigan” has reached that mark since October, and that barely cleared the bar with 6.03 million.

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The average live viewers for the first 11 episodes of last season? 7.257 million.

The average live audience for the first 11 episodes of this season? 6.027 million. That’s a loss of roughly 1.23 million people who aren’t watching Fire live every week anymore.

Okay, so that’s not good news, but is it as bad as it looks? Let’s dig a little deeper and look at why the ratings are down, and if there could be any mitigating circumstances that have contributed to the decline.

One thing we know is that Thursdays are tough for the One Chicago shows. We saw that with Med last season; because the rest of NBC’s Thursday night schedule is comedy, the shows don’t fit well and the lead-ins tend to bring in smaller numbers. Once you added in DVR viewers, Med was really the second highest rated show last season.

That could also be the case for Fire. Being taken off the air for Thursday Night Football didn’t help, and CBS now has a strong competitor at 10 p.m. in its reboot of S.W.A.T. featuring Shemar Moore.

Less popular lead-ins, schedule preemptions and tougher competition—you could say it’d be weird if Chicago Fire ratings hadn’t taken a hit this season.

Another thing that we need to consider when looking at Chicago Fire ratings is how they compare to the rest of the One Chicago franchise. That’s because it’s not the most stable time for our team right now; we had one show cancelled this summer and rumor was that Chicago Med was also up for cancellation, before getting its midseason slot.

PD normally hovers around the 6 million eyeball mark this season, while Med has performed up in the 7 million range at its best, so Fire is not keeping the pace. If NBC has to downsize the franchise again, we might be concerned.

But for now, we should be cautiously optimistic, keeping in mind that the series has had a number of obstacles to deal with, and hoping that once the Olympics are over and the rest of the season is back on the air, the numbers will get back to the 7 million range we saw last season.

We’ve included the live ratings for both Chicago Fire season 6 and season 5 below so you can see the numbers for yourself, and then tell us what you think of the ratings situation in the comments. Check the figures out after the jump.

Chicago Fire season 5 ratings (through 11 episodes; in millions):
1. 7.52
2. 7.40
3. 6.93
4. 6.65
5. 6.99
6. 6.48
7. 7.94
8. 7.77
9. 7.62
10. 7.15
11. 7.38

Chicago Fire season 6 ratings (through 11 episodes; in millions):
1. 7.18
2. 6.05
3. 6.01
4. 6.32
5. 6.54
6. 5.78
7. 5.90
8. 5.23
9. 5.65
10. 6.03
11. 5.61

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Are you concerned about the Chicago Fire ratings this season? Give us your opinion on the figures in the comments.

Chicago Fire returns March 1 at 10/9c on NBC.

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