One Chicago ratings report: Week of May 15
How did the Chicago Med season 3 finale fare in the ratings on an otherwise empty 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—the last one until September, as a matter of fact.
The Chicago Med season finale was left all on its lonesome this week, as our medical drama was the last One Chicago show to wrap things up for the 2017-2018 TV season.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t a great ending. “The Tipping Point” brought in a season low amount of live viewers for Chicago Med, with a score of 5.49 million people watching live.
That’s a significant drop from last week‘s 5.77 million (a loss of roughly 280,000 people) and a bit disappointing for a series that was doing gangbuster numbers throughout the early part of this season.
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It was the seventh most-watched broadcast TV show on Tuesday (holding from last week), and eighth amongst adults 18-49 (down one from last week).
So what happened?
There are a couple of factors that could explain this decline. The first is that, plot-wise, Chicago Med did not have a huge storyline to promote. The outcome of a conjoined-twin surgery is different than whether a character will live or die (Chicago PD) or a two-hour finale event (Chicago Fire).
Big things happened at the end of the episode, but you can’t give those things away in a promo. As far as NBC could run in its ads and such, Med didn’t have the same juice as PD or Fire.
The other issue is something we’ve harped on quite a few times when reporting One Chicago ratings—the lead-in. The lead-in to the Med finale was the finale of Rise, which NBC officially cancelled last week.
Though Rise was up in its series finale (from a 3.8 to a 4.2), that’s still a soft lead-in for Med as it tries to drum up an audience for its last episode. So it probably won’t surprise you when we tell you that Med was smashed again by CBS‘s NCIS: New Orleans, as that finale had 8.99 million live viewers.
The Chicago Med season finale was also the lowest-rated finale of the three One Chicago season enders. It brought in almost a million less viewers than both Chicago PD (6.29 million) and Chicago Fire (6.34 million).
In fairness to Med, again, it didn’t have the same kind of big narrative that those two finales did. And the numbers for Fire only jumped in its second hour; the first half of that finale only had 5.44 million live viewers, which was incrementally less than what Chicago Med did on Tuesday.
But this is still not what you want to see for the show in its finale, which is typically one of the higher-rated episodes of a season as fans and casual viewers alike tune in to see how it all ends. And it’s not the note you want to end the whole One Chicago season on!
Next: Should Natalie say yes to Chicago Med proposal?
Will a move to Wednesday—not to mention another possible creative revamp, based on all those cliffhangers—lead to a Chicago Med ratings boost? We’ll see in the fall.