Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Bad Parenting and other disasters

Tuesday, 8 February 2011

Well, while Underbelly on Mondays has tumbled down from its lofty heights, Seven's Packed to the Rafters continues to draw a massive crowd to the network with almost 2 million viewers stopping by for the season premiere. Even better for Seven was the halo effect the show had on My Kitchen Rules giving that show its best audience so far this year with 1.55 million folks.


And then there's 9.30...

Look its not all bad - on the surface Parenthood improved week on week in the slot by 90,000 viewers but when you look at the lead in almost 1.2 million people deserted Seven after Packed to Rafters, not bothering to stick around for the American drama.

I either expect Seven to swap it with another 9.30 our (Desperate Housewives or Brothers & Sisters) or slot in something new altogether but either way expect this to find a 10.30 home pretty quickly, a 60% drop from 8.30 to 9.30 is not sustainable on anyone's books, let alone from the number one show.

Still at least Seven's programmers can take comfort with the fact that they're not Nine's programmer's.

Nine's 9.30 show suffered a 51.5% audience drop from a much lower base (the overplayed 18-49 draw Top Gear) which resulted in a lower audience (455K) the difference though, between Parenthood and Ben Elton Live from Planet Earth,is Parenthood hasn't been relentlessly promoted all summer.

Ben Elton has, to the extent that there's been some sort of faux rivalry started up in the media between Elton's show and Adam Hill's new show with Media favourite Hills being pre-ordained the winner (as far as I know they're not even in direct competition)

Admittedly Nine's promo was remarkably opaque with no actual footage of the show (it reminded me of the advanced promotion of David Tench Tonight) but still an audience under 500,000 at 9.30 is woeful and this show might be headed for the chop if it doesn't pick up quickly.

Actually, yesterday, GNW got under half a million in its 9.30 slot. Maybe live comedy is out of vogue (even Your Gen is down in Audience numbers at 7.30) replaced with the resurgent American sitcom.

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