One Chicago ratings report: Week of May 8 to May 10

How did Chicago Med season 3, Chicago PD season 5 and Chicago Fire season 6 fare in the ratings this week? Find out in the One Chicago Ratings Report.

Another week in the One Chicago season has gone by, so it’s time for another edition of the One Chicago Ratings Report.

This was the last full week of the 2017-2018 One Chicago season, with two season finales out of the three shows. Did the big conclusions to these seasons also mean big ratings? Well, that’s what we’re here for.

The penultimate episode of Chicago Med aired Tuesday and “Crisis of Confidence” recorded 5.77 million live viewers.

The good news is that breaks the show’s recent streak of ratings declines; the bad news is it’s not by much, as that’s only 0.02 higher than last week‘s 5.75 million.

More from One Chicago Center

As you can imagine, the incremental gain didn’t do much to adjust Chicago Med‘s rankings among all of Tuesday’s broadcast TV shows.

The series held steady as the seventh most-watched broadcast show Tuesday night, but did move up one place among adults 18-49.

It was tied for seventh with ABC‘s comedy Splitting Up Together (which is a bit ironic because former Chicago Justice star Monica Barbaro guest starred in this week’s episode).

There was no change in Med’s competition: it was still beaten well by CBS‘s NCIS: New Orleans (8.12 million) but continued to steamroll ABC’s For The People (2.09 million).

Watch One Chicago on fuboTV: Watch over 67 live sports and entertainment channels with a 7-day FREE trial!

One Chicago’s season finales started Wednesday with Chicago PD, and “Homecoming” gave us another impressive performance from the Intelligence Unit. Its 6.29 million live viewers made PD the second most-watched show on broadcast TV this Wednesday.

That’s a 0.23 gain over the previous week (so, about 230,000 more eyeballs). Its 1.2 share in the demographic tied the series for fourth place with FOX’s musical drama Star.

Chicago PD ended the season up one spot in total viewers and with no change in its ranking in the adults 18-49 category. But after being knocked down by Dick Wolf‘s Law & Order: SVU last week, it did reassert its position as NBC‘s most-watched show of the night, being the only one to reach the six million mark.

Last but certainly not least, we have two hours of Chicago Fire to report on this week as the show ended its season with another back-to-back showing. Which means there’s going to be a lot of math here, so bear with us.

At 9 p.m. Fire brought in 5.44 million live audience members. That was enough to knock out ABC’s Station 19 (at 4.51 million) but less than the two back-to-back episodes of CBS’s sitcom Mom (at 9.10 million and 7.92 million respectively).

But once into its regular time slot of 10 p.m. things improved significantly. The formal season finale of Chicago Fire jumped to 6.34 million live viewers—a gain of almost a million. So while the first hour was on par with the last two weeks, the second hour grew the audience (no surprise here, as finales tend to do some of the biggest numbers of any TV season).

Here’s where things get really interesting: if you tuned in early, you may have noticed that Fire‘s lead-in was an SVU rerun—which is exactly what happened last season! Except, of course, last year SVU was leading into the season 2 finale of Chicago Med and then a new episode of The Blacklist.

So for comparison’s sake: the first hour of the Fire finale brought in less viewers than last year’s Med finale (which had 6.79 million viewers). But the second hour beat The Blacklist (which had 4.96 million).

Next: Does Dawson's cliffhanger mean she's leaving Fire?

What does all this mean? Well, it essentially bears out what we’ve been discussing through the season. The first half of the two-hour event was on par with the average ratings Chicago Fire has had most of the season—but a bunch of extra viewers tuned in to see how it ended.

Plus, with a two-hour block instead of comedies as its lead-in, Fire didn’t have any trouble holding onto NBC’s audience! All in all, it was a pretty good week and now we hope for a similar uptick next week to finish out our season.

Home/Chicago Fire