Two Words

I have two words
Swamp. People.

I'm kicking myself that I missed it.

How do I know about this show - only through The Soup, that alone makes it must watch television.

Meanwhile what has happened to How I Met Your Mother.

I don't think that Seven has ever tolerated a 7.30 audience under 500,000 viewers - ever. Something else will be there next week.

Y So Sleepy?

The combined audience at 7.30 - approximately 5.5 million
The combined audience at 8.30 - approximately 4 million
The combined audience at 9.30 - roughly 2.6 million

Now the drop between 7.30 - 8.30 I get, I was a kid once, 8.30 is a popular bedtime for kids who need to be at school the next day.

But 8.30 to 9.30?? Are there really that many adults going to bed at 9.30? That's a huge drop off for audience figures and its reflected by the pathetic viewer numbers of post 9.30 shows.

Ten's new drama the Defenders may as well be on oneHD with its Offspring lead-in counting for nothing. Similarly Criminal Minds is suffering from the same rerun fatigue as NCIS.

Back to Reality

Well day two for The Block is still good, but kept in check by the bafflingly popular Home & Away (seriously I don't know a single person who admits to watching this show!)

Meanwhile the appetite for NCIS has waned, there was a time when reruns of the procedural would draw in 1.1million viewers without breaking a sweat. Not anymore, now that people have options on digital TV, its getting harder to justify reruns in primetime on the major networks.

Cock Blocked by Nine

OK so the title has very little to do with the post in this instance - but Nine's revival of the Block as a strip has gotten off to a great start.

Elsewhere - Seven's coverage of Wimbeldon on 7TWO has delivered less spectacularly, and more worryingly their 9.30 show on the main channel (Air Crash Investigations) is dead in the water. When you're beaten by Rescue Special Ops you know you have failed.

Boys retreat to digital

You know how I can tell that Seven has the female audience stitched up on Sundays? Look at the digital channels, male skewing shows dominated with 7mate's entire night, Big Bang, Top Gear all peaking over 300,000 viewers.

First Blood (aka Rambo) absolutely dominated digital on the night, how many women would be watching that? Instead they were all glued to Downtown Abbey on channel 7.

By contrast any digital channel going specifically after women last night bombed. 7TWO would do better running a test pattern on Sundays rather than persisting with Royal Upstairs Downstairs. Meanwhile GEM's The Reader bombed despite being the most recent movie to screen last night!

Think Small

Well there's no stopping Seven - the week's top shows read like a list of Last Week's top shows...

Dancing with the Stars, Downtown Abbey, Australia's Got Talent, Masterchef, Winners & Losers, Amazing Race and Glee.

So lets look instead at Digital TV and what's working and what's struggling.

Sunday:

Lots of movies on this night so digital dominance is never assured, if you're after a mature drama then GEM is your option, more brash blockbuster fare lives on GO!, 7mate and Eleven.

The abject failure of the night is Royal Upstairs Downstairs on 7TWO, surprising and yet not, because most of the potential audience for this crap would be watching Dancing with the Stars in prep for Downtown Abbey. A case of Seven cannibalising its own lineup.


Monday:


GO! back when it started was something fresh and exciting, now it's more or less cheap and nasty. The number of original series on the channel has nosedived and those that are left are victims of wildly inconsistent scheduling.

GO! is now a dumping ground for channel nine reruns, specifically Top Gear and the Big Bag Theory, propped up with Movie reruns (some quite good) and timeshifted stuff from the main channel (like Come Fly with Me in this particular night).

What happened to the GO! that drew me away from cable with TMZ, Seinfeld and a dozen shows aimed away from the mainstream?

At the first sign of competition these things were junked in favour of Top Gear reruns.

Abject failure is oddly enough on GO! which has hollowed out it's sked so much that any sort of regularity or consistency is roundly ignored by viewers - hence the poor performance of the Funniest Home Vids daily show (basically FHV without the crap about competitions or corporate sponsors)


Tuesday:


Seven's schedule on this night is still britcoms but is a slightly different shape than Autumn's lineup giving a bit of breathing room to 11 which has picked markedly this week.

Even The Office on a lowly 111K is posting its best result all season, but Ten's attempt to go retro and replace Raising Hope with Frasier bombed losing over 20,000 from its leading and knocking Nurse Jackie (which is now airing 1 day after its US broadcast) and Californication out of contention.

Special Mention has to go to BIG on GEM, a reality show (also on Nine - there's that timeshifting at work again) evidently so boring that nobody can be bothered to even make a wikipedia page about it, and it charted so low that it didn't even make the digital top 100 - surely a sign that your show is a waste of everybody's time.


Wednesday


You know if I ever bothered to watch GEM - I think I would grow to hate myself, If GO! has turned into a clearing house for hits you've seen before, GEM has turned into a 24/7 Fly on the Wall channel, and the flies are all over this one - with titles like "The World's Hairiest Person and Me", "Embarrassing Teen Bodies" and "Brothers & Sisters In Love" if there's such a thing as hell, this is surely the only channel they can get there - well, this and C31.

I have to give a shout out to Jersey Shore over on Seven Mate - its one of the biggest TV phenomena in the US to come down the cable in some years, by the same channel (MTV) that gave the world The Osbornes, a show that has had so much impact in the US has fizzled out here - yet the reasons are obvious, anyone who wants to have seen it - has seen it.

MTV on Foxtel plays this show constantly, everyone else would've torrented the thing two years ago, (which is an appalling wait for Australians in this day and age)


Thursday


On Thursday's everyone gets a turn, the older skew on the night seems to throw up a situation with lots of shows scoring decent numbers and nothing really failing (Except for Heli-Loggers whose potential aud probably went to bed at 9.30 - quick Seven better slot in another rerun of Family Guy)

Balls-Out Bogans and other observations

Sunday, 29 May 2011

Well it's easy to see that the winner of the night was Seven, with their new series "Downtown Abbey" a period drama which will run for seven weeks (and have another series later this year).

Clearly everyone loves to see some toffey period action because it netted one of the biggest Sunday audiences of the year so far!


Monday, 30 May 2011

Virtually identical to last week, except No Ordinary Family actually added 70,000 viewers and Offspring and Masterchef went up as well. Winter is kicking in.

Over two hours Rescue: Special Ops actually did worse than last week's CSI double.


Tuesday, 31 May 2011

While a snarky part of me is happy to see a Lisa McCune drama fail (why couldn't it have been the sleep inducing Blue Heelers?) another, more reasonable part of me is baffled as to why Nine would pit this against Seven's top rating Tuesday slot. Seven has owned this night with Australian drama for years now.

There's no Aussie dramas on Wednesday or Thursday nights, why not try it there rather than unsuccessfully trying to divide (and supposedly conquer) your potential audience.

Oh BTW - Australia's Got Talent - biggest aud of the week at a shade under 2 million viewers - incredible.


Wednesday, 1 June 2011

I have to just put it out there. Mike & Molly is a flop, it pains me slightly cuz out of all the choices at 8pm on a Wednesday - it's what I watch, and its quite a decent show, but for whatever reason it is driving people away from Nine.

Big Bang Theory at 7.30 almost nets 1 million viewers and then the numbers fall off precipitously - recovering slightly for RPA, but not much.

Also what is the go with 9.30pm

Viewers at 8.30pm = 3,676,000
Viewers at 9.30pm = 2,604,000

That's a hell of a drop off and yet the digital netlets didn't feel it, all their 9.30 shows more or less maintained their lead in audiences, those viewers going to bed were all watching the analogue channels. Maybe the government is right to be putting set top boxes into pensioner's homes. Back to bed people!


Thursday, 2 June 2011.

Easily the biggest night for Digital TV, if you're wondering what it means when I've shaded a program green, it means their PEAK AUDIENCE was over 300,000 viewers, so you can be sure its a popular show.

GO! continues to prosper with its superior movie line-up, Charlie's Angels almost doubling last week's Miss Congeniality 2 (now you know why their hasn't been a #3).

Maybe Nine should think about putting RBT on Tuesdays and sending the less popular AFP onto Thursday night shopping duty. RBT shouldn't be good, its a show about the most boring minutae of police work - getting drivers to blow into a machine to test their blood alcohol. It should be boring, but for some reason the mix of balls-out bogans a... how funny is this - AS I AM WRITING THIS - a cop car has pulled someone over up the street from here and my street was flickering blue and red for a good 5 minutes. Naturally I hung out my window to see what was going on, and thus you can see the appeal of RBT.