Following my post with polls for readers to guess the ratings for Castle last night, I can now announce the results!
Castle scored a 2.2 adults 18-49 rating, and 11.26 million viewers last night. The rating is just 0.1 of a point shy of the two season high rating episodes, which were of course "Target" and "Hunt". But the audience of 11.26 million viewers is the new season high audience, eclipsing the previous season high audience of 10.94 million viewers, set back on 15 October by "Murder, She Wrote", by a touch over 300,000 viewers
Castle's lead-in, the season premiere of Dancing With The Stars, pulled in a 3.2 rating and 17.06 million viewers. These numbers are far better than any of the episodes in the All Stars season last year which led in the first 8 Castle episodes this season. In fact, to find a comparable rating and audience, you have to look back to the 2011-12 season.
Let's have a look at the results of the polls:
Firstly, the ratings, where nearly 24% of voters selected 2.1 as their ratings guess, making it the most popular category. This was very closely followed by the 2.2 ratings guess, which received just under 22% of the votes, and making those voters the ones who guessed correctly. The third most popular selection was 2.6 or above, with just under 15% of the vote. It's good to see there are some optimists out there, though you have to look back to last season's "Cops and Robbers" to see the most recent rating of that magnitude, a 2.7
Onto the audience now, where a little under 31% of the vote, by far the majority, went to the 10-10.5 million viewer selection. The 9.5-10 million and 10.5-11 million selections were the second and third most popular with just under 20% of the vote, and just over 19% of the vote respectively. Just 4.15%, or 8 out of the 193 voters, guessed the correct result of 11-11.5 million viewers. The optimists were at it again, making the more than 12 million viewer selection the fifth most popular with a little under 8% of the vote
If we see another 3-4 weeks of results comparable to what we saw last night by both Dancing With The Stars and Castle, then that should be more than enough for ABC to secure season 6 for Castle. ABC will know that they have a pretty popular duo of shows on Monday nights, and moving or canceling one would certainly be detrimental to the other, especially in Castle's case. However next week NBC return with guns blazing, literally, with the return of Revolution at 10pm, which will go head to head with Castle, and the return of The Voice from 8-10pm will directly compete with Dancing With The Stars. We will find out next week whether ABC's decision to bring Dancing With The Stars back earlier, is a good one
Finally, let's have a look at some graphs for this season, and enjoy Castle's upward trend
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| Castle's L+7 rating was the best of the season for "Hunt", but could last night's episode be bigger?? Tune in in 3 weeks time for the results! |
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| That was a massive spike in the lead-in audience thanks to Dancing With The Stars. Let's hope it continues! |
Thanks for reading, as always. You can see the ratings and analysis for this season of Castle here. You may also like to see my new website, castlefanvideos.com
Bring on next Monday night!
Jimmy
