"The Originals opened its fifth and final season on Wednesday with 1 million total viewers and a 0.4 demo rating, up from both last season’s Friday average (940K/0.3) and finale (800K/0.3) while also doubling Life Sentence‘s short-lived average in the time slot."
As predicted, coming on after Riverdale helped. But what's also interesting is that the show lost very little of Riverdale's lead in because:
"Opening The CW’s night, Riverdale (1.08 mil/0.4) ticked up with its musical episode."
And that scene in which Posey asks her co-star if she felt like they were doing Columbo is really quite a good one, and it does sort of play as something one might see on that show, so I can see why Posey thought that...