Peter Krause's 'Line of Fire' Gets a Full Season at NBC

The freshman drama's first three episodes averaged about 3 million same-day viewers, then jumped 70% once a week of delayed viewing counted.

Peter Krause's new NBC drama, Line of Fire, is getting five more episodes, enough for a full 18-episode first season, Deadline reported Thursday.

The show started with a 13-episode order and now runs into 2027, according to Variety. Deadline calls the Monday-night series a hit. The numbers behind that word show who still watches network TV and when, and a lot of them watch days later.

The show is a family drama in a federal badge. Krause and Hope Davis lead the Hollingsworths, whose members work across the FBI, the U.S. Marshals, the Secret Service and the Justice Department, and who seem to be targeted by an assassin, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Joshua Safran, whose credits include Gossip Girl and Quantico, created it, and Jenna Bush Hager is one of the executive producers.

Start with the people who do tune in on Monday. Network and Nielsen figures reported by Deadline show the show's demo rating rose 47% in its second week, and the Oct. 19 episode hit a season high in same-day numbers. The Hollywood Reporter added that the drama has done much better at 10 p.m. Monday than Brilliant Minds did in that slot last season.

Then look at who shows up late. Live and same-day, the opening three episodes pulled an average audience of 2.98 million, The Hollywood Reporter said. After a week of catch-up viewing on regular TV, before any streaming was counted, that average reached about 5.06 million. That's a 70% jump from people who watched later in the week.

Add streaming and the curve keeps going. In the month since the Sept. 21 premiere, that first episode's cross-platform audience has climbed to 14 million, a count that includes NBC's reruns, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Citing the network, Deadline said the premiere also got NBC's biggest DVR lift for a first episode since the Night Court reboot in January 2023.

That steady growth is why the new episodes came quickly. Earlier this month NBC asked for five extra scripts, which made Line of Fire the first new broadcast series of the 2026-27 season to get a back order, Deadline reported. Thursday's pickup turned those scripts into episodes. The Hollywood Reporter added a footnote: CBS ordered 20 episodes of Cupertino before it ever aired.

Variety's TV critic made the long-term case in her review, writing that the show "has all the makings of becoming a classic in the canon of beloved police procedurals." So far, its audience keeps arriving for days after an episode airs.

Source: Deadline, retrieved October 23, 2026. Other sources: Variety, The Hollywood Reporter.