Monday 1 June 2009
Biggest Disappointment
Two & a Half Men (r)
Nine 7pm, down 156,000 viewers week on week
Biggest Improvement
Supernatural
Ten 9.45pm, up 100,000 viewers week on week
Hmmm not sure what to make of the precipitous fall of How I Met Your Mother. It's just sunk, completely overwhelmed by Masterchef and Two and a Half Men. It's a good bet that after Scrubs finishes in a week's time Mother will move in on Wednesdays behind Earl vacating this slot for older skewing fare.
The move of Mother to Mondays at the top of the season was a bit unexpected to say the least and in all fairness to Seven, it hasn't worked out. After generating so much goodwill for the show by running it at 7pm throughout summer, Seven managed to kill it by scheduling it against the current king of all sitcoms - Two and a Half Men!
Nine gave them a few brief weeks of reprieve by scheduling mediocre reality at 7.30, but soon wised up and brought back the Men to open their night.
For Nine, very good, not quite great, seems to be the most apt description.
New skeins You Saved My Life and Missing Persons Unit both registered mild increases on the shows they replaced raising by 60k and 50k respectively.
Sea Patrol, however, lost 102,000 week on week while Good News Week and Four Corners gained 93,000 and 84,000 respectively.
After spending most of it's vaunted return season in 2008 looking like a deer in the headlights of Ten's bad Monday programming, GNW is starting to reap the benefits of a stronger Ten and less harsh Monday competition with Desperate Housewives well down on it's historical highs and Underbelly gone (until next year) Ten have proven that you can go back to the well.
For those who don't remember, GNW is an ABC original which aired on Friday night in a 30 minute format, they spun it off with a live Saturday night series - Good News Weekend in 98.
When Ten bid for the show's fourth season (and won) they not only extended the format to an hour, but the kept the spin off, moved it to a Thursday (???) and called it GNW Nite Lite running for 90 minutes, that was two and a half hours of the show per week and it failed to fire.
Incredibly just when everyone had forgotten about it, ten decided to bring it back early last year, to Monday nights in a one-hour 8.30 timeslot. It's held the same timeslot ever since and after very patchy ratings it's starting to poll consistently over the 1 million mark, this is a very good result and proof perhaps that in this country old formats never die!
Now if only we can figure out a way to revive Hey Hey...
3 comments:
Test
LOVE reading your daily analysis. And love that you talk about which shows gained and which shows lost week to week. They is how ratings should be reported, as it keeps everything in perspective.
Just an idea though, instead of saying "Supernatural up 100k, Missing Persons up 50k" etc, how bout doing it in %s?
Raw numbers don't mean that much. And it's hard comparing which shows are doing well and which are failing, as each show is coming off a different base. For example "Packed to the Rafters" and "Lie to Me" may both add 100k week on week - and those numbers seem even.
But when you consider "Packed" adding 100k is a
about a 5% week on week gain, but "Lie to Me" is about a 10% gain, you can see that clearly "Lie" grew DOUBLE what "Packed" grew.
%s are a LOT easier for people to get their heads around.
Thanks He - I'll take that on board - I used to do a lot of percentages in the early days but haven't really done any since the start of this season - I'll always happy to take on requests so I'll work it into the next few days (from Wednesday on - it's Midnight Wednesday as I'm writing this!) and we'll see how it looks!
Thanks for reading :)
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