Chicago Med season 3 ratings report: Chicago Med ratings in review

How did Chicago Med ratings hold up in this latest season? We examine Chicago Med season 3 ratings and see what they can tell us about Chicago Med’s season.

With Chicago Med season 3 in the books, we’re taking a more thorough look back at the show’s ratings this season, to get a better look at how the series fared during the 2017-2018 season.

There are three important things to know when evaluating Chicago Med ratings this season. The first is that the series competed in a new time slot, moving from Thursdays back to Tuesdays.

The second is that Chicago Med season 3 started late, since NBC shifted the program off of its fall schedule onto the midseason schedule.

The third is that we’re calculating with a smaller sample size, because the midseason move also meant that three fewer episodes of Chicago Med were produced this season. We only had 20 of them, as opposed to the 23 from last season.

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With all that in mind, let’s take a look at the live viewership numbers and see what they show about Chicago Med season 3.

The highest rated Med episode this season was episode 7, “Over Troubled Water”, which pulled in 7.88 million live viewers.

That also has the distinction of being the highest rated episode of any of the One Chicago shows this season! Neither Chicago Fire nor Chicago PD got to the 7.25 million mark, so kudos to Med for having the best-performing episode by a wide margin.

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Of the 20 episodes this season, five of them passed the 7 million live watcher mark. 11 installments brought in numbers in the 6 million area. Only four of them were in the 5 million range.

The show’s worst-rated episode was, strangely, its season finale “The Tipping Point” which had just 5.49 million eyeballs. We say “strangely” because season finales are traditionally among the highest-rated numbers during a TV season, since audiences tune in to see what happens at the end.

In fact, three of Chicago Med‘s four lowest-rated episodes were the final three episodes of its season. So what does that tell us? There are two probable causes here, and both of them are likely contributing factors.

The first is that Med went from having NBC’s top-rated drama This Is Us as its lead-in, to having the freshman drama Rise instead. Rise struggled out of the gate and was ultimately cancelled by NBC after one season—which affected Med because there were less viewers for our show to try and carry over.

The other is that TV viewers could’ve just lost interest in the show’s storylines in those final three episodes, which featured several elements that dragged. From Reese’s dad being a possible killer to the twin surgery plot that went over most of the second half of the season, Med took longer with some stories than it needed to, and that could’ve also tuned some folks out.

Ultimately, Chicago Med season 3 had an average of 6.59 live viewers—which is pretty darn good for a show that started late and had less episodes. For comparison, that average is better than all but two episodes of Chicago Fire season 6 and more than half of Chicago Fire season 5.

Next: Should Jeff Clarke come back to Chicago Fire?

After the rumors that Chicago Med was on the chopping block last season, the show should have put any doubts to rest with how it performed this season. Having said that, its slide at the end of the season is cause for concern—hopefully that won’t carry over into season 4. But Chicago Med ratings are better than the show’s gotten credit for.

Chicago Med returns to NBC this fall.

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