Law and Order SVU ratings report: Week of October 25

How did this week’s Law and Order SVU season 20 episode do in the TV ratings? Here’s the Oct. 25 edition of the SVU ratings report.

With the 20th season of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit season continuing, it’s time for another look at the Dick Wolf series’ TV ratings with the SVU Ratings Report.

After multiple weeks of tumbling, Special Victims Unit finally posted a ratings gain this week! The latest episode “Exile” reached 4.16 million live viewers on Thursday evening.

That is a gain of 200,000 people from the 3.96 million who tuned in to watch “Accredo” the week before. It’s still lower than the 4.2 million for “Zero Tolerance” at the start of the month, but it’s a step away from that number.

Overall, SVU held its position amongst Thursday’s broadcast TV shows. It was still 10th out of all the shows that aired, and slipped slightly from a 1.0 to an 0.9 share among adults aged 18-49.

So while the show gained additional total viewers, it didn’t gain any spots in the rankings. Still, it’s a great first step, especially since Thursday continues to be controlled by Thursday Night Football on FOX.

Where did SVU‘s extra eyeballs come from? Though CBS‘s SWAT beat it in the ratings once again, that series lost a small portion of its audience (going from 5.51 million to 5.34 this week).

But here’s a quirk: over on ABC, the lower-rated How To Get Away With Murder was also picking up audience members (rising from 2.75 million to 3.05 million)! Its gain was actually 10,000 more live watchers than SVU.

So perhaps less people were watching football and SWAT this week, and their loss was the gain of Olivia Benson and Annalise Keating. Could this be the turning point that SVU season 20 deserves? Let’s keep watching and see.

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The next few weeks have some pretty big episodes coming up, with a number of high profile guest stars (and one very high-profile director in a Chicago Fire fan favorite), so it’s entirely possible that numbers could continue to climb.

While the SVU ratings aren’t where fans would like them to be, it’s welcome news to see that they aren’t continuing to fall. And especially as we head toward the end of the year (and the midseason break), a strong finish to the first half of the season would look great for a possible season 21.