Ratings for ABC's Castle has gradually gone down from last year, but one of the new showrunners has a defense for this slide.

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The season 7 premiere of Castle earned close to 11 million viewers last September. Compare this to the 6.84 million who tuned in for the season 8 premiere, and some fans have grown concerned. The show has mostly hovered around the 6-7 million area since then, with many wondering if this has to do with Castle (Nathan Fillion) and Beckett (Stana Katic) being on a break for most of that time, or if there's some other factor.

But ratings for most TV shows have declined in this age of DVRs, Netflix and Hulu, and Castle may simply be part of this downward trend. That's what new showrunner Alexi Hawley suggested in a recent interview with TVLine.

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"Here's the thing: We returned at a number that we have basically done every episode since. And once you factor in the DVR numbers, we're doing around 9 to ten million viewers a week, which is a really healthy number these days for network television," Hawley explained.

Hawley used one of ABC's newest hits Quantico as an example of a show that may not have an impressive viewership on first glance but is still considered a hit for the network.

"I know we used to be 13 [million], I understand that. Even Quantico, which is a hit for ABC, is doing seven to eight million a week [with DVR playback]. Obviously the 18-to-49 demo number is not as strong as we'd like it to be, but all we can do is try to tell really good stories and hope that people want to watch them," Hawley said.

So what kind of numbers will Castle draw upon its return in February? It remains to be seen, but considering the show mostly left things on a good note in the recent fall finale, viewership shouldn't drop too much, if at all.

Castle returns for the second half of season 8 on Monday, Feb. 1 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on ABC.

Tags: Castle television ABC