Red Reddington has a right to be cocky: His NBC drama was the breakout hit of the 2013-14 season. Still, with the show dropping more than a million and a half viewers between its first and second episode of this new season, the show will want to avoid the precipitous declines of some once-hot shows that came before it.
The onetime-phenomenon still has a season left, but the show is definitely not going out on a high note. The Ryan Murphy-created series, which averaged 12.45 million viewers in season two, repeatedly hit all-time ratings lows last season, when it averaged a paltry 5.06 million watchers.
Blacklist producers are probably quite aware of Revolution's sad saga, in the hopes that the same fate doesn't befall their own show. Revolution, also an NBC property, kicked off in 2012 with 11.7 million viewers, but it couldn't keep people tuning in, due in part to a lengthy hiatus in the middle of season one. The post-apocalyptic show called it quits in May with just 4.13 million people glued to their sets.
The highly touted Fox dinosaur drama was never a ratings disaster, dropping only about 2 million viewers from its premiere to its season-one — and ultimately series — finale. But the overall ratings just weren't high enough to save the expensive series from extinction.
Could this show's trajectory be any more depressing? Sure, spinoffs tend to be a risk, but this one in particular squandered potential. It premiered to 18.5 million viewers in September 2004 before quietly bowing out to a meager 4.09 million with its March 2006 finale.
Simon Cowell's second singing show in the U.S. never lived up to its pre-premiere hype, and frankly, it was never all that good. Still, its 2011 premiere garnered a lot of attention, with a rather impressive 12.5 million people tuning in. Alas, its series finale two seasons later was seen by fewer than half that many people.
Welcome to ratings erosion, bitch. The soapy teen drama managed to survive on Fox for four seasons — albeit with a truncated, 16-episode final one — but subsequent seasons never matched the first in terms of viewership and pop-culture currency.
Remember Veronica's Closet? Don't feel badly if your memory is hazy. Still, someone must have been watching this show, given that the show's debut was seen by a whopping 35 million viewers, a number that is unheard of nowadays. (Certainly, landing the plum post-Seinfeld timeslot didn't hurt.) But Kirstie Alley and the gang couldn't make it last, and the closet went bare after three seasons.