New Rant: Australian Idle

There's a new rant over at my new blog

Lots of big upheaval in television this week from both here and in America.

With both these stories it's almost a case of - duh!

Here in Australia, the long running and once unassailable Idol franchise has gasped its last, after suffering several years of middling ratings (hovering under the 1 million mark for most of last season which is painfully low compared to the 3 million viewer highs of its first two seasons) and a public indifferent to the "talent" (singles from the last few idol winners have been fizzers on the ARIA charts) the show was producing.

Officially the show is on hiatus and will not be making an appearance in 2010, unnofficially Ten would be unhappy with being Seven and Nine's bitch and would want to use their Commonwealth Games launch pad late in the year to launch something good with half a chance of success.

Read the whole thing at my new blog...
http://seven2nd.blogspot.com/2010/01/television-rant-australian-idle-and-us.html

Slo-Mo Comedy Train Wreck

Wow - a bit of a turnaround for Ten last night with sophomore drama Rush lifting to it's best audience yet and yet another timeslot win but the lift for Rush also spelt the best result all week for Idol.

Looking past these results this blogger is gratified that Burn Notice seems to be catching on, a nice 80's style action drama there really is nothing else like it currently on TV, so it's good to see it getting traction.

More worrying is the numbers for Seven's TV Burp and Double Take now in no-mans land with both under 700,000 viewers, oddly despite the urging of several in the blogosphere that Burp was the superior show, swapping the two around has actually hurt both in the ratings, this looks like being the most painful slo-mo local comedy train wreck since David Tench/Ronnie Johns and those shows had their fans as well so it's sad to see.

Fake Hair is preferrable to Hot Hair

That's one of the many conclusions I can draw from last night's ratings where 20 to 01 trounced Australian Idol. I wonder (aloud) whether Idol is still profitable with a million viewers and 16-39 wins only - it seems to be on the decline - Mathison's departure and Sandilands' exit haven't helped it much and there's little to no buzz about the show at the moment.

20 to 01 meanwhile is a show that is totally reliant on it's competition if it's up against two good shows there's no hope, but if there's a weakness, a gap somewhere - it just soaks up the remaining audience - such is it's watchability.

Whether you're watching to catch the seams in Bert's hairpiece or trying to guess how they'll work a Heath Ledger reference in this week - you know it's easy entertainment - TV junk food as it were.

Elsewhere Nine has problems at 9.30 - I have no idea why, surely with a choice of All Saints and NCIS there's an under-served audience somewhere in there - whoever they are aren't willing to commit 2 hours on a weeknight to a rerun movie. Honestly aside from the odd Friday/Saturday movie I cannot think of any other night suited to two hours viewing of anything - there's so much 'else' to do, internet, videogames, hell even sleep! Speaking of which...

Sunday Bloody Sunday!

A return to Monday nights is just what City Homicide needed after being put under the pump on Sundays earlier this year.

Seven's cavalier attitude to scheduling sometimes does more harm than good, Homicide at one time owned Monday nights before Seven decided to move it to Sundays out of the way of Underbelly, probably a shrewd move but given that Homicide's core audience is over 50 that sort of timeslot juggling doesn't go down well with that crowd.

At any rate after the ill fated Sunday experiment the show is back and returning to prominence on Monday nights, more importantly it is reviving the fortunes of Seven's Crime Investigation Australia ripoff - Beyond the Darklands, itself a victim of a catastophic Sunday sojourn earlier in the year!

Ten, riding low at the moment thanks to the slow-burning 7pm slot (yes I'm being generous here) almost, almost had a good night with Idol and Good News Week both doing nice numbers.

I say almost because the whole thing was brought undone with Dexter. This show has an admittedly clever premise (the hero is a serial killer who only kills bad guys - yay!) but it has three strikes against it:

a) It comes on after 2 hours of family friendly light entertainment, the endless pile of carcasses of high-brow shows after Rove on a Sunday night should be an indicator of what happens to this kind of show on Ten
b) It's already aired on (Premium) cable
c) It's already out on DVD - you only have to witness the buzz about True Blood, a violent, sexy vampire epic from HBO which was unleashed on DVD barely a month ago to realise that people who want to see these shows are seeking them out and not waiting for the networks to get around to it.

Even more baffling is that Ten decided to schedule it 9.30 Mondays after it failed earlier this year also at 9.30 Mondays!!! There's just no excuse!

Nine was engaging in some state to state weirdness last night - the show Drop Dead Diva has been dropped in some (read WIN) markets in favour of The Mentalist (like that hasn't been repeated enough!) while Adelaide inexplicably dropped The Big Bang Theory for a reality show called Animal Emergency - what on Earth were they hoping to gain from that?

Secret Sunday Scheduling

Launch last night for Rescue: Special Ops - a show which not only apes the look of Rush - but also the audience size with 1.13 million sampling - that's not too bad really - more worrying is the turnout for CSI Miami at 9.30! Did anybody even know that it was on? I don't recall any promos, how the hell does Nine expect folks to follow this kind of ridiculous mystery scheduling!

Of course the story of the day is Australian Idol, due to return next Sunday in direct competition with Seven's Dancing, dumping judge Kyle Sandilands after the now infamous incident on his radio show last week.

It's not constructive for me to add anything to this in the context of a ratings blog - except to say that the fact that Sandilands will be on Idol for at least the first 3 weeks (during Auditions and the workshops) will make for some interesting results ahead...

Big Week

Sunday 26 April 2009
Every April for the past several years Ten has a really big week, and this is the one, that’s when the finale of the Biggest Loser meets the premiere of Big Brother.

This year of course the scenario is a little different, Big Brother is no more, the show a victim of a myriad of bad decisions in the final season coupled with the standard viewer decline.

The Biggest Loser has surged in recent weeks and pulled in a very good result up 293,000 viewers week on week and 313,000 ahead of its nearest competition.

So You Think You Can Dance, by contrast, has limped along at times this year and although week on week it improved 281,000 viewers it struggled to hold sway against 60 Minutes and Seven’s The Force which has slotted into Sunday nights nicely.

Last Year the finale of Dance scored 1.8 million viewers, this year there were 416,000 less watching with an almost uniform decline in every capital.

What the show seemed to lack this season was buzz, if anything Biggest Loser had more press going in thanks to the behind the scenes antics of Ajay Rochester and Shannan Ponton whereas the dancing comp has been buzz-free since its return.

I’m not sure how ten can liven things up next year – some are suggesting a later start to the season, others are suggesting a new night.

Season three seems to be the point where ten starts mucking around with the format of these shows, for Big Brother season 3 saw the two-houses gimmick, Idol had change thrust upon it thanks to a Dicko defection, so the precedent is there, but also in both those cases a change in the format was followed by an audience decline.

A quick note that The Evidence seems to be doing well for Nine in the 10.30 hour and Bones actually beat CSI last night!! Perhaps people really were tuning in to see Grissom!

Remember to watch this space tomorrow, it’s gonna be a big night, the premiere of Masterchef, the finale of The Biggest Loser – up against, of all things, Underbelly, also the premiere of Eleventh Hour and Four Corners has a special on the recent Vic Bushfires which should see a good result for them.