The season premiere of ABC’s Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (0.7 demo rating, 2.6 million viewers) predictably dropped by double digits from its year-ago premiere on a Tuesday at 10 PM. It also came in short of Marvel’s Inhumans, which started the season in the slot during Premiere Week of this year. But it matches ABC’s best rating in the slot since then. The combination of Once Upon a Time on Fridays at 8 and Inhumans at 9 had been stuck at a 0.5 average from 8-10 p.m. every week from Oct. 20 thru Nov. 17.

After Agents’ launch, 20/20 clocked a 0.5, and 3.0M viewers.

NBC’s Dateline (0.9, 4.9M) tied CBS’s Blue Bloods (0.9, 8.8M) as the top-rated show of the night in the demo, while Blindspot (0.7, 3.3M) matched its season high despite the previous week’s preemption.

CBS’s MacGyver (0.8, 6.7M) and Hawaii Five-0 (0.9, 8.6M) dropped a tenth, matching series lows, but still dominating their slots in both metrics. At 10 PM, Blue Bloods slipped to its third-smallest overall audience, but likewise topping the hour in that metric, while sharing the demo win with Dateline at 10 PM; NBC’s newsmag took over at 10:30 PM.

Fox’s The Exorcist (0.4, 1.2M) fumbled much of its Hell’s Kitchen (0.7, 2.8M) lead-in. And, CW’s holiday specials, Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer (0.3, 1.4M) and Masters of Illusion Christmas Special (02, 1.1M) scored typical Friday CW stats in the demo, but were broad enough to deliver the net’s most-watched Friday of the season in total viewers.