One Chicago ratings drop below four million in latest week

One Chicago ratings crashed as Chicago Fire, Chicago PD and Chicago Med aired reruns instead of season finales.

The Wednesday before Memorial Day normally brings some of the biggest One Chicago ratings, but this year, all three shows aired repeats—and continued their ratings freefall.

May 20 would have been Chicago Med, Chicago Fire and Chicago PD‘s season finale date. But due to current events, the series had their finales over a month ago, leaving NBC to put reruns in place of what are normally some of the most massive episodes of the season.

And fans continued to not watch, sending the franchise to some of its lowest ratings over the last five weeks.

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Chicago Med‘s repeat of “I Can’t Imagine the Future” (the second time that the episode has re-aired in two months) brought in just 3.32 million live viewers. Out of 12 programs that aired on broadcast TV, the show came in eighth.

It also fared poorly amongst adults 18-49, losing another tenth in the demo for a second consecutive week. Its 0.4 share also put it in eighth place within that category.

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After hanging on to the 4 million mark last week, Chicago Fire dropped beneath that line this time around. Its re-air of “Protect A Child” brought in 3.08 million eyeballs. That’s a loss of 1.02 million, or almost a quarter of its audience.

The show fell to ninth place out of 12 overall and tied for eighth in the demo. And while the marks for Chicago PD were slightly better, they still weren’t great.

The encore of “Brother’s Keeper” had 3.39 million people tuned in live, down from the prior 4.03 million (-0.64, or 640,000). In the last two weeks, PD has lost almost a million viewers. At least, at seventh place in total audience, it was the most-watched One Chicago series.

But needless to say, the disparity between what would have been here and what actually ended up airing is shocking. The three Chicago shows are normally pulling in around 9 million people and coming in as the top three series on Wednesday nights. Now, they’re down to about a third of their regular audience, and well outside the Top 5.

That’s not even against tough competition; the only network to air all originals last night was FOX, with the season finale of The Masked Singer and the premiere of Ultimate Tag. CBS had the finale of SWAT up against Chicago PD, but as far as scripted programming, the night was repeats almost everywhere as every network had the same challenge of finding content.

So this isn’t a case of people having other shows to watch, unless you’re also a fan of reality TV. People just aren’t tuning into One Chicago repeats—so it seems the shows don’t have the same power during the offseason.

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