The various variations of the ongoing track have all succeeded splendidly in all past versions. Those serials with their many very varied versions and the current one in MEIEJ all have the most necessary factors in common - excellent lead-pairing with superb couple-chemistry and mass-popularity ranging from very good to outstanding.
The only way they could botch this track in viewership is if they go against mass-audience's tastes, and those have been consistent enough for a decade or two that the mass-reactions to any factor in a track can usually be gauged at the outset.
We need them to remain under the villain's pressure for just a few days (2-3 episodes maybe, but not in excess of a week), to ensure that the bond and protectiveness of the couple for each other strengthens and strikes the mass-audience's chord.
But they need to avoid embarrassment of the male lead except in *extremely* infrequent and light dose. The more they avoid that facet (unlike in the the previous many months of tracks), the less the conservative majority-audience is likely to switch channels.
Once that bonding of the couple is accomplished, they can move out of the adversaries-overflowing residence, move into a small home of their own (poverty-stricken would mean greater proximity and more mass-appreciable scenes for the mass-audience), and return a few weeks later to face-off against their adversaries from a position of strength.
The couple getting ground down and bullied under the enemy's roof for more than a few days would be totally unnecessary.
Mainly, DVD's scenes together - without intrusive presence of adversarial or helpful other characters - need to be used to fill at least the first half of each episode.
Let the mass-audience get used to the knowledge that the scenes they would like to see will be in that first half of every episode.
They'll slowly get habituated to tuning in for that, and checking in on the last couple of minutes, and it would help the series start to climb steadily out of its current problematic viewership-lack situation.
Whatever other scenes and filler stuff the series wants to show can be put into the latter half of each episode (excluding the last couple of minutes and precap), so that even if mass-audience switches channels out of distaste or disinterest during those, it won't hit significantly at the episode's viewership-amount.