Cancellation Watch: Braindead Debuts Poorly, The Last Ship Returns Low, Plus the Ratings Roundup

Unless otherwise noted, the ratings numbers below are based on the final overnights and may vary slightly from the preliminaries reported on the Cancelled Sci Fi Twitter Site.

Ratings Results of Interest: Last Monday, the new CBS sci fi / political satire series Braindead had its debut but could only muster a 0.7 rating based on the overnights for the 18-49 demographic with 4.9 million total viewers.  Those are pretty tepid numbers for its network even for a Summer series, though it did have some pretty stiff competition from the NBA finals that night.   In its favor, the show is owned by CBS and comes from the creator of The Good Wife who the network has a good relationship with. It also has a streaming deal with Amazon similar to the one that previous CBS Summer sci fi entries Under the Dome and Extant had. However, that couldn’t save either of those two from cancellation last season, and Braindead is starting out near the series low levels that Extant previously experienced. So consider this one very much On the Bubble out of the gate.  Also on Monday, MTV’s Scream slipped to a series low 0.17 rating with about 340k total viewers.  It may have also been impacted by the basketball game and it did still make it into the Daily Nielsen Twitter Top 5 for the night, so it is still registering well with the network’s target audience.  On Wednesday, FOX’s Wayward Pines leveled off its decline as it held at a 0.7 rating with 2.5 million total viewers.  Whether that will be enough to keep it going into the third season M. Night Shyamalan has planned remains to be seen, though.  On Thursday, Orphan Black held low for its season finale at a 0.13 rating with around 330k total viewers.  Word broke last week that it will be returning for a fifth and final season. On Sunday, TNT’s The Last Ship returned at a series low 0.39 rating with 1.8 million total viewers. I’m not sure if that was the average across its two hour Season 3 premiere or just the ten o’clock numbers, though, so waiting for verification on that. Plus it may have been impacted by schedule juggling as this premiere was originally supposed to be last week. I’m going to give this one a week to settle down before I make a judgement call on where it stands. Also on the downside, AMC’s Preacher slipped notably to a series low 0.43 score for the night and Showtime’s Penny Dreadful could only manage a 0.14 rating for what turned out to be its series finale. Perhaps strong competition from the last game of the NBA finals as well as the highly touted “Battle of the Bastards” episode of Game of Thrones threw these shows off for the night and maybe next week will give us a better gauge.

Ratings results for the sci fi / fantasy shows airing Monday June 13th thru Sunday June 19th (metric definitions below):

(Links are to the show pages on this site with season to date ratings results and status updates)

Chart Activity: The “Battle of the Bastards” episode on Game of Thrones shot that show to Number 1 on Weekly Nielsen Twitter Rating Top 10 for the week (and probably some of the screaming on Twitter about HBO Now going down helped as well). That show also topped the cable Top 25 for the week based n the overnights for the 18-49 demo and total viewers. Person of Interest slipped out of the broadcast net Top 25 based on the Overnights (though it was right at the Number 26 slot) and it slipped to Number 12 based on total viewers.

(Updated for the broadcast network and cable Top 25 chart activity)

Be sure keep an eye out for the latest numbers and any breaking news throughout the week at the Cancelled Sci Fi Twitter Site. You can see the status of all the currently airing sci fi / fantasy shows at the Cancellation Watch page and also the latest Sci Fi TV Power Rankings post. And for more information on where I get these numbers and how I make my Cancellation Alert assessments, check out the Cancelled Sci Fi FAQ.

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Metric Definitions:

Series: (R) indicates a repeat airing

Rating: Overnight rating in the 18-49 demographic for same day viewing based on the final numbers unless otherwise noted

% Chng: The percentage change +/- for this week’s rating vs. last week’s rating (if a new episode aired last week).

Tot Viewers: Estimated total viewers (age 2+) to tune in to the episode for same day viewing.

StD Rating: Season to date average for the rating metric tracked above.

Net Avg:  The season to date average rating for the network for non-sports, non-special, non-repeat programming.  This data is available for the broadcast networks only.

Cancellation Alert: My prediction of the likelihood that a show will get cancelled. From least to most likely the statuses are Low, Moderate, Medium, Elevated, and High.

Source: ShowBuzzDaily and TV by the Numbers