WEEK ONE
There have been several sizable series premiere ratings this season, but Resurrection was the biggest surprise of them all. It opened on March 9 with a whooping 13.90 million viewers and a 3.8 demo rating, absolutely crushing everything else on broadcast including the premiere of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2.1). And it pulled this off in the biggest hour of the week for cable originals; the competish this week included The Walking Dead (6.3) and the spiking finale of True Detective (1.6).
WEEK TWO
The second episode dropped 18% to a 3.1 demo. This is a fairly standard week two drop, and when you start that big, anything near the week two standard is a very good thing.
PROGNOSIS
Someone who's usually in the know on these things says season one was limited to eight episodes due to behind-the-scenes issues. That's not a great sign about its long-term future, but it definitely makes this short-term prediction easier. It's really hard to see this falling from "surprise hit of the season" all the way to "bubble" in just six more weeks, especially considering it only has to face The Walking Dead for two more of those six weeks. I could envision a scenario where the show is a bit above the bubble ratings-wise and ABC does away with it because the trajectory is so negative. But even that feels like a really extreme case. Renew.
"First Two Weeks" is an ongoing experiment to see how often a new scripted show's fate can be predicted by the very earliest data. Here are the picks and lineups for every show this season.
