Breathing Room

Monday 11 May 2009
With Underbelly finished there was a little breathing room last night for other shows in the 8.30 timeslot to flourish. Seven lucked out getting a rare Monday night AFL match (they usually go to Ten) between two popular teams! The result was a thumping win with Seven combining the power of AFL with their popular dramas north of the Murray.

For reasons not yet revealed Melbourne viewers missed out on Scrubs meaning that different states are going to be out of sync for a while. Ten also has this problem with the AFL scratching two SVU eps and one Medium ep that southern viewers are yet to see. With AFL trying to make inroads onto Monday nights there are going to be more of these matches in the future causing all sorts of programming issues for the rights holders – ahh if only we all followed the same code of Football.

But we don’t and followers of Rugby League weren’t left in the cold last night, although they probably felt like a hot shower afterwards as the ABC’s Four Corners lifted the lid on the activities of Football stars and their groupies.

You know Four Corners is onto a hot story when the press is talking about it on the Monday morning before it airs – well the news media has been onto this one since last Thursday when former Cronulla Sharks player Matthew Johns revealed on the NRL Footy Show that he was involved in an incident examined on the upcoming program.

The report achieved drew one of the program’s biggest audiences this year winning its timeslot in Sydney with 404,000 viewers and even pulling a respectable crowd in the non-league cities.

Also rising in the ratings was Good News Week up an astonishing 277,000 viewers week on week, by contrast Supernatural fell off further looking very shaky in this 9.30 timeslot.

Also looking shaky is Eleventh Hour – Nine may give it one more week to see how it does behind Sea Patrol but its performance last night was dreadful, without the viewer magnet of Underbelly the show fell 296,000 viewers and managed only 676,000 – amazingly though with this poor figure it was second in it’s timeslot!

2009 - Week 2 - The News

Week two of 2009 has come and gone and thanks mostly to a cricket lead-in, Nine News had a great week, though most of that strength was centred in Melbourne and Sydney with Nine still struggling in the west.

A Current Affair also had a big week thanks to an interview with Magda Szubanski re her new year weight loss resolution.

Here's the breakdown of how the news rated - city by city...

Praying for Summer - Thursday 20 November 2008

Nine had another great trip down memory lane back to the 90s with This is Your Life their top show for the night, all prime time shows* fell under the early evening strips as is increasingly the trend with Seven news again pulling in the most people at 6pm.

The finale of Make Me a Supermodel did the business at 7.30, personally 7.30 has become a TV dead zone where you start praying for the onset of summer programming for some sweet relief – luckily for me relief came with Comedy (113) screening two episodes of Scrubs against all this dross. I did manage to see the tail end of Oprah’s schmooze-fest where she was talking to Baz Luhrmann via Skype (hey at least it wasn’t via hologram) only two minutes of this and I felt physically ill. Ten has only been the latest to get on board a week long news and current affairs bandwagon hyping the f*ck out of this film.

Back on Tuesday Nine jettisoned any semblance of news content on A Current Affair for a half hour tie in for this movie, on Wednesday night I caught the tail end of ABC News and noticed it had morphed into Entertainment Tonight whilst I wasn’t looking, canvassing audiences at the film’s Darwin premiere, this in a week where Australia’s third largest city is being torn apart by the weather, car companies start heading for the exit door and yet another child care monolith goes down and yet the most important thing on any television news agenda is Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman – give me a break!

The 10.30 contenders (Heroes and The Strip) both got a boost with Ten News making way for Out of the Blue, which got it’s regular audience, but the surplus people up at 10.30 split between Seven and Nine (mostly to Nine).

Also that’s seven shows over the million mark for Ten, not too shabby this week, Tonight is a contest between movies Ten has You, Me and Dupree which is first run, Seven has I, Robot which is a rerun but has the stronger lead in, Nine will probably beat them all with Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

*Although official Prime Time is 6pm - 12.30, I consider it to be 7.30 - 10.30 on weeknights and 6.30 - 10.30 on Saturdays and Sundays