The week that was

Lets have a look shall we...

Sunday, 22 May 2011
Australian Television Prime Time Schedule

Ahh the eternal struggle between Masterchef and Dancing continues, with Dancing succeeding by sheer weight, being over twice as long as its cooking competitor.

Monday, 23 May 2011
Australian Television Prime Time Schedule

Come Fly with Me drops week on week but Big Bang Theory actually rises! Go figure. Meanwhile The Amazing Race loses 100,000 viewers week on week while Ten's shows hold steady, though House suffers by having a month off the sked and probably not being compatible with Offspring.


Tuesday, 24 May 2011
Australian Television Prime Time Schedule

Tuesday night is almost identical to the previous Tuesday with Nine continuing to bring up the rear with the dreary Customs/AFP double. Also Sea Patrol at this point is merely making up the numbers for Nine's drama quota, stick a fork in it.

Wednesday, 25 May 2011
Australian Television Prime Time Schedule

State of Origin (in 3 markets anyway - but that's all they need!) Normally on a Wednesday Nine is coming a distant third to the other two nets, who incidentally managed to continue their fight despite State of Origin. Indeed the Origin match seems to have brought in a lot of one-time lapsed free to air viewers.

In Sydney alone Origin netted in excess of One Million viewers - Sydney never produces that kind of number any more having the most fragmented audience and the biggest Foxtel take up in the country.

Thursday, 26 May 2011
Australian Television Prime Time Schedule


Thursday belonged to channel ten with one of Oprah Winfrey's final shows giving them the edge at 8.30.

Ten often puts Oprah into Primetime as filler but this year has seen some of the more successful entries with Oprah's Australian specials pulling a healthy aud. Before that you'd have to venture all the way back to 1993 and Oprah's interview with Michael Jackson to find a primetime Oprah special that rated so well.

For the record Oprah's Final show on the Friday night netted 743,000 but came second to Nine's cross-city combo of NRL and the Mentalist (893,000)

Also Between the Lines (which actually Eddie's third vehicle this year - This is your Life being the show I'd completely forgotten about!) has been axed after consistently being outrated by its leadout - which suggests that viewers are avoiding it on purpose!

Erosion

This time a year ago - Merlin was riding high as the big new hit drama with 1.3 million viewers providing a big lead-in to the brand new Masterchef.

A year later - Masterchef is riding higher than ever - but Merlin is in the gutter - kicked to the curb by Mike Munro and Nine's factuals.

Nine's idea of sticking their Customs program on Sunday nights at 6.30 is a genius move sapping the heat out of Border Security (although BS still does pretty well for what was a rerun) there was a time when these Nationalist Paranoia showcases polled 2 million an outing - but that was the old television, before multichannelling, abundant PAY TV and internet enabled everything!

Underbelly returned to good numbers but far short of their 2009 form, still it's in no danger of cancellation - but perhaps budget cuts on future seasons if the numbers continue to soften

If House were on Seven it would have shipped to 10.30 last year - if it were on Nine, we'd only see it at Summertime, because it's on Ten - they persist with the 9.30 timeslot because they have no 10.30 slots, have nothing to replace it (so they can't wait until summer) and their multichannel is an expensive experiment in sports programming that no-one watches.

Surprise Erosion!

One of the features of television ratings in the past couple of season in this country has been the rapid audience erosion on Thursdays. Fridays and Saturdays were always TV dead zones, where the only people watching seemed to be in their 60s and over (judging by the schedule)

Now we all know that there's a fair stay at home crowd in the 30-40 age range - these are the people with young families who might be home some of the saturdays - but generally these people are harder to pin down and these days with Cable, DVD rentals, the internet and video games there are far more options for this age group - so the networks don't bother to try to cater to young people on these nights.

But in the last few years the audience has been eroding on Thursdays as well. Starting around 2008 we saw drastic drops in Thursday audiences with the only successful shows being cop dramas and 20to1, it was like the people meter population was all on Thursday night shopping which would make sense except a lot of states do it on a Friday night!

Whatever the reason - I didn't see this coming - but for the second week running we have really low figures on a Wednesday night.

Only 4 shows after 7.30 made it past a million, the number one show for the night was a measley 1.28 million viewers (Customs) and former million raters Cold Case and Gang of Oz struggled to keep their shit together in prime time slots - and I don't even know what's going on with Burn Notice - egad!

At least you have Steve Leibmann

Wednesday was a curiously low-viewing night across all the channels with only the bafflingly popular Customs and the milquetoast Spick & Specks making any real impression on the people meters.

The popularity of Customs was perhaps helped along by yesterday’s news story about Australia’s international terminals installing those nude scanners by next year

Only a few nights into the season and already I can see a trend emerging and a problem for programmers to solve.

Young viewers are mostly gone, at least large numbers of them are using the DVR or the internet or watching cable and the digital channels (Lost’s final season premiere was top of the digital pops last night with 216,000 viewers).

The ones that are left are spread so thinly that even youth magnets like So You Think You Can Prance are finding it hard to keep a million people in front of the box for two hours.

In their place the nets are trying to pitch to older viewers, notice how almost the hot young-skewing properties on Seven and Nine have made their way to 7TWO and GO! while people stuck with analogue TV feast on a morbid diet of docu-soaps and cop shows.

Now we have the situation where two cop shows can’t exist in the same space – look at the 8.30 aud for Cold Case, a veteran show for Nine was smothered in fourth place, suffocated by the more agile Criminal Minds – itself headed for veteran status in it’s fifth season and struggling to maintain a healthy figure.

The low, low audience for sophomore doco Gangs of Oz might suggest that people are starting to tire of this real crime stuff – seriously anyone who is way into this has an entire cable channel along with numerous shows on other channels to sift through day after day – Gangs has to be pretty special to make its mark and the problem is – it has no real hook – Crime Investigation Australia the CI series which is rerun on Nine at least has Steve Leibmann.

The Really Odd Couple

One of the more annoying aspects of this season has been Nine’s propensity to team episodes of Two and a Half Men with everything under the sun.

They started this year by getting cold feet about The Big Bang Theory and slotting in the UK Mashup Customs at 8pm Mondays as a bridge between the sitcom and Underbelly – the move was fairly successful but most of that success could be attributed to the large masses tuning in waiting for Underbelly to start.

Nine tried to go in for a double dose of reality after Easter with Missing Pieces and You Saved My Life, both lame attempts to post feel good factual skeins that would trade on the success of Seven’s Sunday and Tuesday megahits.

Well times aren’t like they used to be and with the advent of Ten’s steamroller Masterchef people have dropped Seven’s Sunday offerings like a bad habit, while Nine’s rip-offs never got a look in.

A a few weeks of woeful ratings Nine gave Missing Pieces the axe and placed new eps of Two and a Half Men at 7.30 to partner Missing Pieces.

I don’t know about any of you who read this blog – but I watch a sitcom to get away from these dreadful fly on the wall shows, ever since Nine switched onto this strategy Two and a Half Men has held up it’s end of the bargain (it regularly beats Seven’s How I Met Your Mother) but as soon as 8 o’clock rolls the viewers grab the remote and head for Scrubs over on Seven.

Anyone who wants to see a factual is most likely watching the superior Recruits over on Ten.

Now news comes down that Nine will attempt the same deal on Wednesdays partnering Two and a Half Men at 7.30 with What’s Good For You at 8pm in order to move RPA to the 8.30 slot.

Partly this is good news, RPA is a completely different genre to anything else on Wednesdays 8.30 and thereby has more chance of success than the current drama logjam which is screwing up that night, but I don’t think pairing the lifestyle show with the sitcom is going to work

To put it bluntly – I don’t think anyone who regularly follows the teachings of Charlie Harper is the slightest bit interested in what’s good for them!


Monday 22 June 2009

Going Up
Australian Story up 23.24% week on week
Spooks up 19.45%
Brothers & Sisters up 13.53%
Neighbours up 13.52%
Deal or no Deal up 11.12%
7.30 Report (aka Utegate) up 11.11%
Desperate Housewives up 10.85%

Going Down
Supernatural down 29.34%
You Saved My Life down 27.59%

Nine, Ten up, Seven, Two down - Monday 30 March 2009

A very good Monday for Nine and Ten with both channels increasing their average aud in Prime Time while Seven and the ABC fell backwards week on week.

Save for How I Met Your Mother, the rest of Seven’s primetime took a hit with Scrubs losing 26k, Desperate Housewives losing 85k and Boston Legal shedding 21k week on week.

None of those losses looked that bad when put next to the ABC with Australian Story, Four Corners and The Cut all shedding in excess of 100,000 viewers from last week.

Nine’s biggest improvers were Customs (up by 108,000 viewers) and Crime Investigation Australia (up 99,000 viewers), Underbelly went up after several weeks of decline clawing back 52,000 viewers

The biggest gains however were at Ten with their special broadcast of stand up comedy from Melbourne (where most of the viewer increase was) netting an impressive 1.1 million and pushing the late news into the top 30.

Serial Killer found bludgeoned to death with gold statue - Monday 23 February 2009

Underbelly continued its stride into the record books with a third week over two million, although losing 174,000 viewers week on week. Perhaps they were watching the season finale of Top Gear on SBS which ran for 90 minutes and clocked an extra 190,000 on the meter.

Customs and Two and a Half Men both dropped slightly also, affected by the driving show, whereas offerings on the other three nets held their ground from last week.

Good News Week has some minor good news lifting 65,000 viewers while Four Corners dropped by 193,000 but the real spoiler of the night was the Oscars which caused a minor drop for Dexter (yes its still on) 23,000 viewers and a significant drop for Brothers & Sisters (which would be pitching to the same aud) 130,000 viewers – the Sally Field borefest should stabilise next week when Nine plays it safe with Crime Investigation Australia – but with that move we can consider Dexter cooked.

Nine’s unconventional strategy of airing the Academy Awards show live and then fitting a prime time replay around their schedule paid off nicely allowing them to capitalise on the awards twice over without disrupting what is currently their biggest night.

Bad News Week - Monday 16 February 2009

Underbelly virtually held all of its gargantuan audience second week in. This is certainly shaping up to be high watermark in Australian television and channel Nine’s best chance at promoting their 2009 lineup, infact anyone with their TV tuned to Nine last night would have been inundated with promos for their struggling Wednesday lineup.

A decision which, a few weeks ago, I blasted as being sheer idiocy has actually worked out well for Nine (just a moment whilst I fetch a hat to eat) that decision being the axing of The Big Bang Theory replacing it with a hastily cobbled together factual series Customs, err sorry Vince Colosimo: Customs! I wish Nine had persisted with Big Bang in this slot because it strikes me that this Customs show is attracting a lot of folks waiting around for the next program, but anyway – despite the short-term thinking the move is still a great success.

Also a success is the Australian Ladette to Lady – question is can they carry that across to Tuesday nights and how long does the series even go for – the opening scenes suggested that the course at Eggleston Hall ran for four weeks – that doesn’t seem like a very long series to me.

Desperate Housewives lifted a little last night and incredibly Brothers & Sisters retained 94% of its audience which must be some kind of record. I fully expect to see 11 more weeks of Friday/Saturday encores for these two shows to keep the viewers up to speed while they flirt with the crims over of Nine.

Speaking of Encores, the remaining 500,000 people who haven’t seen Dexter on DVD or Showcase were entertained I guess – but Ten is hurting badly on Monday night – even after what was a fairly solid start to the evening by Neighbours and So You Think You Can Dance.

Good News Week has dropped week on week by 61,000 viewers while Four Corners rose by 143,000. Indeed these two shows seem to be fighting over largely the same audience and seeing as the ABC ain’t gonna budge it might be wise for Ten to move GNW to 9.30 (there’s a lot of Ex – Enough Rope viewers looking for something to watch) and Dexter to 10.30.

Of course that leaves the 8.30 problem – given that the slot will be a loss for the next 10 weeks anyway, why not encore screenings or Out of the Blue!! (OK maybe that’s going too far!)