No gimmick to speak of

What the hell? How on earth did Farmer Wants a Wife net more viewers for the reunion special than at any point in the entire season?

Is this a case of people saying en masse: "cut to the chase"?

Of course they were helped out no end by the moribund Lie to Me, a featureless crime show with a gimmick, drowning in a sea of crime shows with gimmicks. At this point people have to realise that these shows need engaging or interesting characters to stand out, much like a lot of Ten's procedurals the characters in this just seem to blend into the background, against Criminal Minds, a show whose premise contains no gimmick to speak of, yet their ensemble cast is a group of characters each of whom could carry a show, the difference is there for you to see on the chart.


Over on digital it was great night for Eleven and 7TWO and Decent for 7mate and GO! though how GO's programmers think its sustainable to run so many movie slots is beyond me, its almost programming by panic.

Still when you see the alternative, a steady schedule - as demonstrated by GEM, then maybe panic is the way to go, GEM's post 7.30 lineup across the week has more or less fallen off the map.

Outta Control

Sunday, 23 January 2011

I'm back folks!

I was never really gone, but I've had a busy year between welcoming a fantastic new member to my family, dealing with an increasingly hectic day-job and rediscovering my passion for Video Games which kept me away from the television for a good part of 2010.

What little TV I did watch was mostly via Foxtel so I lost touch with the world of Free to Air (FTA). But recently I'd begun to notice that FTA has done some catching up in the past year.

Two new channels (7mate and GEM) virtually sprang up out of nowhere and while there's a certain irony in 80's 4:3 reruns and Lifetime movies taking up valuable HD bandwidth - they still add to the variety and the main selling point of digital television.

Then we had ABC News 24, Launched in time for the snap election earlier this year - again taking up valuable High Definition real estate in a weird attempt to recover lost ground from Sky News which in 2010 had come into it's own with the outstanding Agenda and Paul Murray programs.

Finally this month we've seen the launch of 11, using the number (whoever at Ten got No's one and eleven reserved is a legend, far better than 72 or 23!) gives a sense of importance and more importantly the netlet's schedule is a huge throwback to the way Ten was back in the 90s, before the dark times, before Big Brother.

Back when I was still doing this blog on a regular basis I was covering the 3 commercial nets and the ABC, now look at it!



I've excluded SBS, the ABC netlets and OneHD (because it's a failure in my eyes) but even then - there's 9 channels - the colour scheme is getting a little crowded - so I'll appreciate any suggestions on how to present the chart going forward.

But here's the first new one anyway - the most striking thing about it is the number of shows under a million, almost everything. Sure it's still summer - but I suspect in the future anything above 800,000 viewers will be considered a rousing success!