Come Fly With Me (not you Newcastle!)

Monday, 16 May 2011
Australian Television Ratings Report

Monday was an interesting night with each net throwing a new show onto the pit of despair that is Free to Air television, with interesting results.

Seven is the network that is (and has been for the past 5 years) most likely to succeed and so they finally did something that I never thought they had the balls to do - a local version of The Amazing Race.

I guess the US version's ratings had gotten to a state where Seven felt comfortable shuffling it off to their HD channel, Where it has done well for itself but not in a Neighbours sense. (which is the current yardstick for analogue to digital transplants.)

An Audience of 1,258,000 (5th) 756,000 18-49 (3rd) is a good result for a first outing and like a lot of reality shows, I'd expect the aud for this to build over time.

Ten is the bottom of the heap network trying every damn trick in the book to claw its way up. It knows big event TV but drama has never been its strong suit. The season premiere of Offspring, a show about, who knows - some sort of Ally MacBeal wannabee (its not really aimed at me as an owner of a penis!). 927,000 (12th) and 588,000 18-49 (5th) is respectable but they'd be hoping for that to improve given the massive lead in

Meanwhile Channel Nine has done something quite remarkable. This is the former champion network in many ways a shell of its former self, so how they managed to debut a new show (a half hour mockumentary british sitcom at that) with a peak of 1.7 million is beyond me, but well done.

While I'm on the topic, Come Fly With Me (the show in question, basically a wholesale parody of those awful Airline reality docos) was subjected to the most baffling case of corporate idiocy that I've seen in years.

Essentially NBN (Nine's Newcastle-Northern NSW affiliate) chose not to take the show because of its 8pm timeslot, the reason? Well the previous show from these creators, Little Britain, was rated MA and considered vulgar (or something like that) and NBN was determined to prove that their viewers are hicks and couldn't handle such ribald humour in an earlier timeslot.

Notwithstanding that this is an affiliate that happily took episodes of Two and a Half Men at 7pm every night for umpteen years without controversy, the decision was baffling because, NBN is actually OWNED BY THE NINE NETWORK! It's an O&O basically and has been since SP Media sold it to Nine after the ownership rules changed a few years ago - so what's the deal with that?

Anyway - even they won't be able to ignore ratings of 1.4 million, so Newcastle viewers should expect to see it on next week without explaination!

MONDAY'S NETWORK SKED

MONDAY'S DIGITAL SKED