Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Late night suprise - Tuesday 9 December 2008


Nine pulled a swifty last night and for one hour became channel seven. A new show, Sudden Impact, which is another one of these car crash doco-soaps and the return of NZ sitcom Police 10-7 did the business in the opening hour.

What’s more astonishing is that ‘tis the season for surprise hit rerun movies with Mr & Mrs Smith not too shabby for the next 2 and a half hours, the icing on the cake was Survivor which was bumped back to 11pm but still commanded a huge aud for that time period, generally after 11 shows are lucky to exceed 300,000 (unless they started earlier or are live sport) so that’s an outstanding figure.

Surely Nine will be emboldened to try out Survivor again in Prime Time especially with an extra season up their sleeves meaning they could potentially show it year round without a break.

Seven seem stuck in 3rd gear in the early evening, Ghost Whisperer did better than Dirty Sexy Money which was hurtled back to 11.30 for it’s long limp off the screen, but Nine’s movie, In Plain Sight and the incompatibility of Ghost Whisperer all combined to give Prison Break a headache down 63,000 week on week.

NCIS was again the best Prime Time series on the night but this audience didn’t carry over for the 2 hour premiere of In Plain Sight with the audience almost halving – even taking into account the drop as the night wears on that’s still a bad result.

Almost as bad was the shocking performance of Rules of Engagement, losing to a show in it’s death throes (Ugly Betty) is a bad thing on any occasion, but losing 135,000 from a compatible lead in is just tragic. Having said that The Big Bang Theory experienced a similar drop from it’s lead-in on Monday (816,000 vs 1,018,000 for Mr Sheen) but still – nobody needs under 700,000 viewers at 7.30, even at this time of year.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The Museum is a surprisingly good show. Hadn't seem Mr & Mrs Smith before. For a dud movie it is actually not that bad!