Monday 3 March 2009

Viewing on the whole was down on last Monday night with the biggest week on week hit going to Nine’s 9.30 hour which sunk, last week Nine followed their megahit Underbelly with a rebroadcast of the Oscar ceremony, this week forced to find a suitable lead-out for the country’s number one show they settled on Crime Investigation Australia, a doco series repurposed from the Crime & Investigation channel.

At first glance you would think that a true crime documentary would be a perfect fit with a true crime drama but it seems that it isn’t, the doco lost a whopping 1.161 million viewers (51.99%) from it’s lead in.

You would also think that Nine would want to use the most valuable real-estate on television right now to promote something that would continue on after the first 12 weeks of the season, what that would be exactly is unclear, the channel nine vault doesn’t seem to be bursting with hidden treasures lately.

Seven’s Brothers and Sisters got the predictable lift with the female skewing Oscars out of the way, while other 9.30 entries stagnated, The Cut can be considered a flop and Dexter, why Ten is persisting with this when surely there is an audience for them at 9.30, especially considering the sub-par competition, is beyond me. Call me crazy but if the mass-audience dropped Lost, Heroes and Prison Break, what makes Ten think they’ll pick up a violent, adults only serial a year into the storyline?

Some good news for Ten was that Neighbours gained while both it’s current affair competitors lost audience in the 6.30pm slot with ACA down 93,000 and Today Tonight down 121,000 – Neighbours was up 72,000 viewers and is tantalisingly close to that million mark – perhaps old Harold was holding them back!

So You Think You Can Dance appears to have fallen into a similar patters as Australian Idol last season where the Sunday show posts an acceptable figure of 1.2 – 1.3 million and the results show hovers around the 900,000 mark – given that this seems to be the pattern Ten needs to shake this up when Idol rolls around – maybe move the results show back a day or two (probably Wednesday their other struggling night) this would clear the decks and give ten the chance to develop something substantial for Mondays which could carry through the whole year, if they were game.

Meanwhile How I Met Your Mother seems to have also settled around the 900k mark which is not a disaster by any means but with Seven blowing two new eps a week they’ll run out of fresh stock before Nine run out of Sheen, that would be a massive miscalculation on Seven’s part – find a show to go at 7.30 and save the new Mother ep for 8pm, moving it out of the way of it’s main competitor – I guarantee it’s figures will look healthier – in fact I wager that if Seven split their reporting into two half hour eps we would probably see an improvement between ep 1 and ep 2.