Nine Blocked from Success

Sunday 24 May 2009
A very good night last night for both Ten (winning the night with 29.3% of the 5 city audience between 6 and midnight) and Seven, both nets stomping all over Nine’s former stronghold.

The drama, Merlin, had it’s best week yet for Ten rising 127,000 week on week, similarly Masterchef rose 215,000 week on week with what surely must be its biggest aud yet.

Rove even lifted 177,000 week on week. And Biggest Loser (spread over 90 minutes) improved on Harper’s Island which was shifted this week to a post-midnight timeslot.

Seven too found a rising tide with Seven News, Bones and Castle all up by 100 grand week on week. While Nine continues to suffer in silence, with HomeMADE losing a further 28,000 in the face of an improved news lead-in and a lift in the overall available audience. (Remember yesterday’s blog – last Sunday viewers watching broadcast = 4.8 million, last night it went up to 5 million)

Nine will soldier on with HomeMADE because it has to but the Sunday show dropping under a million is a worrying development. I can’t help but feel sorry for them, in 2003 they struck reality gold with The Block, a show perfectly timed to capture the insane orgy of home renovations taking place under a rapidly escalating property market.

The creators of this show were hailed as heroes and the concept talked up by the media as if it were the television equivalent of the second coming, to tell you truth I never watched it, but I know it was popular, that first season managed to net a whopping 2.2 million viewers average to the exploits of those apartment renovators.

Nine tried to emulate what Ten does quite successfully parlaying a reality hit into a long running series, but unlike Ten whose shows are build with profitability in mind, Nine was still huge in the ratings and in the habit of spending $4 to make $5, when the second season didn’t meet up to high expectations (the finally still netted 2.2 million viewers!) they were quick to swing the axe.

Ever since then Nine has been trying to recapture the phenomenal success of The Block, not a season goes by without Nine trotting out the line ‘This is the new “Block”’ or ‘From the creators of “The Block”’, like Al Bundy, fixated on his six touchdown streak in a high school football game, Nine can’t get past the success of this show and it’s holding them back from better things!