The peacock network has announced that they are ordering nine more episodes of The Event. Loyal fans of the series may be overjoyed but, it’s important to look at the news in context with the ratings.

The Event follows Sean Walker (Jason Ritter)who’s investigating the mysterious disappearance of his girlfriend. He slowly begins to uncover the biggest cover-up in the country’s history. Others in the cast include Sarah Roemer, Laura Innes, Ian Anthony Dale, Scott Patterson, Clifton Collins Jr., Taylor Cole, Lisa Vidal, Bill Smitrovich, Zeljko Ivanek, and Blair Underwood.

On September 20th, the freshman series had a positive debut with a 3.6 rating in the 18-49 demographic and 10.88 million viewers. Unfortunately, viewership didn’t stay at that level for subsequent episodes and the show’s numbers have been declining each week. Last week’s episode fell all the way to a 2.2 demo rating and 6.5 million viewers. That’s a loss of nearly 40% in the all-important demo rating — in just four weeks.

What’s more, The Event has been ranking in third place for the timeslot in the demo numbers. For the first two weeks, it was opposite FOX’s ratings disaster Lone Star but now, running against FOX’s Lie to Me, The Event could easily slip to fourth place.

The NBC press release about the renewal touts that The Event is outperforming last year’s timeslot holder (Trauma) by 30% in the demo. That’s not exactly very hard to do considering Trauma tanked in the ratings right from the start. It only lasted as long as it did because NBC ended up having lots of airtime to fill because of the Jay Leno Show debacle.

While the full season order for The Event is a positive thing for fans who want to see more of it, the series will have to turn their numbers around to survive to see a second season. That’s a really hard thing to do considering the fact that it’s an ongoing serial with lots of mysteries and a growing mythology. History has shown us that this kind of show’s audience typically shrinks over time, not grows.

If the show is cancelled after one season, hopefully the producers will give loyal fans some closure by the last episode — instead of what happened with FlashForward last season.

What do you think? Will The Event see a second season or be cancelled? Why do the ratings keep dropping? How would you attract new viewers — or at least keep those that the show already has?

Image courtesy NBC.