When Supergirl premiered this fall, there was a lot of hype surrounding the CBS drama. Not only was it a bigger budget TV project than we’d seen over at the CW, but it also had a female superheroine anchoring the show. To almost no one’s surprise, Supergirl had an incredibly strong premiere audience. But then a funny thing happened. The show lost a whopping percentage of its overall viewership and then a whopping percentage again. Still, in more recent weeks the freshman show has had a steadier audience, and this week, we’ve gotten yet another encouraging sign: an uptick in the ratings once again.
The Live+Same Day ratings numbers reported on Tuesday indicate that Supergirl did 8 million total viewers this week, which is a pretty solid number, especially considering last week’s episode only pulled in 6.7 million total viewers. Plus, in the coveted 18-49 demographic, the show ticked up a few notches to pull in a 1.8 rating, according to the network. That's a 20% increase in viewership since last week. That’s not quite as swell as the 2.0 rating that Scorpion pulled in an hour later, but any positive sign related to the series could theoretically lead CBS one step closer to a renewal order for Supergirl.
Last night’s episode of Supergirl had the benefit of airing right after CBS spent a lot of time promoting its shows during Super Bowl 50, so that could have helped viewers to get excited about tuning in the night of. In addition, the episode itself was a memorable one. Brief spoilers in the next couple of sentences if you haven’t watched yet. The drama changed the game quite a bit when it killed off Astra, and may have caused a rift between Kara and Alex in the process.
In addition, interest in Supergirl may have increased now that we know for sure that CBS' DC Comics series will be crossing over with the CW's The Flash in the coming months. If you plan to tune in for the big crossover, it's not exactly a bad idea to keep tabs on what is going on in Supergirl. You can catch the crossover episode on March 28.
I've been watching since the beginning and while Supergirl has had its detractors, I honestly feel that the show has done a great job of improving upon the dialogue and storyline issues evident in the first few episodes. Sure, the show is a little goofy sometimes, but that's supposed to be the tone. It's also impressive that Supergirl is managing to pull in bigger numbers during the time of the year that viewership usually begins to falter.
Supergirl has a strong audience in Live+7 viewers and that should ultimately propel the series to a second season on the network, at least in theory. Still, any increase in viewership certainly helps the fledgling drama to gain more notice by the powers-that-be at CBS. Here's hoping we hear about a Season 2 renewal sooner rather than later. In the meantime, you can catch new episodes of CBS' Supergirl on Monday nights at 8 p.m. ET, followed by new episodes of Scorpion.
