May 8, 2016 5 min read

The fate of about two dozen network series, including “Castle,” “Catch,” “Criminal Minds,” “Code Black,” “and “Crowded” will be known in a few days, but those weekly “Top 10” ratings you may read in this paper or hear on morning radio shows now have little impact on chances of survival. (It should also be noted here that it’s evidently bad luck to have a show title beginning with letter “C.”)

As you read this, the networks are deciphering a complicated set of rating statistics that include same-day viewing, delayed viewing and (ages) 18-49 viewing to determine what shows should be brought back for another season.

With so many alternatives and devices available to watch any series, we’ve reached the point where more than half of a show’s fans don’t watch an episode when it actually airs.

In other words, if “Big Bang Theory” averages 20 million viewers, it’s likely more than 10 million will catch it at some time other than 8 p.m. Thursday. While some watch it later that night, millions of others view it within three to seven days. The time delay is critical to advertisers, so a popular series with a preponderance of “lazy” fans who watch episodes whenever they get around to it, especially after the seven-day time frame, may find the show gets axed, anyway.

While people still love “Top 10” lists in general, the TV list is no longer relevant to networks. It simply relates the 10 shows most people watched in “real time” that week. And that increasingly has little impact of what series are really “hits.”

Let’s look at the week of April 11 to 17.

The Top 10 “real time viewing” shows were “Dancing with the Stars,” “The Voice” (Tuesday), “Little Big Shots,” “60 Minutes,” “The Voice” (Monday), “Blue Bloods,” “Empire,” an “NCIS” repeat, “Madam Secretary,” and a repeat of “NCIS: New Orleans.” The number of viewers ranged from 12.5 million for “Dancing with the Stars” to 9 million for the “NCIS: New Orleans” rerun. Nice list, but it’s not a true indicator of how many people regularly watch certain shows. The networks want more information. Much more.

First, they break out those “real time” numbers to determine how many of those viewers were in the 18-49 age group. On that list, “Empire” is tops, followed by the two episodes of “The Voice,” “Modern Family,” Grey’s Anatomy,” Dancing with the Stars,” “The Goldbergs,” “Survivor,” “The Middle” and “Little Big Shots.

Networks then try to determine which shows doing poorly in “live” viewing may still have a loyal and growing audience. For that information, they check the list of shows that pick up a significant number of viewers over the next seven days.

Of the top “delayed viewing” shows on the April 11-17 list, “Blindspot” and “Blacklist” tend to occasionally make a top 10 “live viewing” appearance, too. But at least four other series on that particular list could be worth renewing as well, based on seven-day total audience. “Lucifer” increases from 3.4 to 6.2 million viewers, “Quantico” moves from 3.6 to 6.5 million, “Agents of Shield” jumps from 3 to 5.2 million) and “The Family” ups its total from 2.9 to 4.7 million.

Of course, even a show that doubles its audience isn’t worth saving if the total number jumps from, say, 500,000 to 1 million viewers. It’s still a bust. It’s also true that if that total audience – no matter its size – is primarily out of the 18-49 age group, it’s getting axed. So networks also look at the actual increase in 18-49 viewers over the seven days. For this particular week, “Empire” ruled, followed by “Modern Family,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Blindspot,” “The Blacklist,” “Quantico,” “Criminal Minds,” “Lucifer,” “black-ish,”and “Gotham.

Finally, there’s that overall list that gauges the number of viewers of any age who watch a show within seven days of its original broadcast. And this can be the saving grace for shows with older audiences that advertisers may not covet but still have a large enough audience that networks will keep them on the air, anyway.

For April 11-17, the top overall shows were, in order, “Blacklist,” followed by “Modern Family,” “Blue Bloods,” “Empire,” “Blindspot,” “Castle,” “NCIS” Los Angeles,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Scorpion” and “Criminal Minds.”

That list alone should seal the deal for renewing “Castle” and “Criminal Minds.”

But those other “C” shows – “The Catch,” “Crowded” and “Code Black” – appear not to have received a passing grade from viewers. They’ll receive another “c” – cancellation.

My, how TV viewing habits have changed. Consider this statistic, courtesy of the Zap2It web site. In a recent monitored period, less than half of the Top 25 shows’ 18-49 ratings came from “live” viewing. Instead, some shows saw major viewing increases during the subsequent couple of hours. For instance, the April 6 episode of “Empire” had a 43 percent increase in audience after its 9 p.m. start, while “Big Bang Theory” jumped an enormous 72 percent. That’s significant especially during Daylight Savings Time, when some folks may not get to the couch before 9:30 p.m., but still want to catch that evening’s programming on DVR.

During Comcast’s recent “Watchathon” week, during which viewers had free access to multiple episodes from network and cable series, the most-watched show nationwide was, to no one’s surprise, HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” followed by CBS’s “Big Bang Theory,” Fox’s “Empire,” HBO’s “Entourage,” Starz’s “Power,” CBS’s “Blue Bloods,” AMC’s “The Walking Dead,” ABC’s “Modern Family,” Showtime’s “Homeland” and E’s “Keeping Up with the Kardashians.”

The Pittsburgh market varied somewhat, with HBO’s “Sopranos,” Showtime’s “Shameless” and USA’s “Chrisley Knows Best” bumping “Power,” “Homeland” and the Kardashians out of the top 10.