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.

We have nothing to fear from those Golden Statues

The Logies were last night and this lumbering beast of Australian television took a real hit to the nads last night - not so much with it's low Audience - it's had audience lulls in the past - but moreso from the fact that it's competition was successful - it seems the likes of Masterchef, Bones and even Castle have very little to fear from the Logie Awards, they have in past years been an incredible spoiler - disrupting opposing programs by sapping away their audiences for the night of night - last night - devoted auds stuck with their favourites, hell Bones, Castle, The Good Wife, even Merlin (though not directly competing) were all up week on week free of the spectre of Underbelly and perhaps aided by colder weather on the eastern seaboard.

Masterstroke

I won't get the chance to do the all important chart until tonight but suffice it to say that you'd have to be living under a rock to not know that the Masterchef Finale was the highest rated non-sports program of the decade!

Here's a ch Ten press release - the numbers are staggering
Ten Corporate Press Release

It's no long term strategy...

Mixed fortunes all around on Sunday night

6.30 was shared fairly evenly, Dancing with the Stars giving Seven the edge on the competition, but no where near as definitively as the show's peak years in 05/06.

Despite coming third in the slot Random Acts of Kindness is shaping up to be a competent performer for the beleaguered Nine Network and once the double threat of Merlin and Dancing leaves they should get some clear air in the back half of the year.

More worrying for Nine is the 7.30 hour where 60 Minutes lost 17% from it's lead-in and 13.13% week on week. Dancing with the Stars also dropped in the 7.30 hour by 8% feeling the heat from the Masterchef which barely lost a soul week on week.

At 8.30 Miss Marple dropped an astonishing 21.7%, Bones an alarming 24.17%! Rove by 18.68% all of this thanks to Nine shelving the Hugh Grant sitcoms and pulling out a recent film that's actually rivetting - The Pursuit of Happyness which saw their week on week performance post 8.30 improve by 10% (Adjusting for Perth Audience). It was a good improvement, but still overall a poor showing and (being a movie) no guarantee of a good turnout next week, this is the dilemma with scheduling movies - it's no long term strategy, which itself is apt as a description for Nine as I can think of right now.

The day Miss Marple kicked Laurence Fishburne's arse!

Sundays are becoming like a see-saw with Seven on one end, Nine on the other and Ten in the middle, at least that's the case with the 6.30 timeslot where Random Acts of Kindness and Sunday Night swapped places for 1st and 3rd in the slot with Merlin happily in the middle.

At 7.30 there's no contest, Masterchef is again posting such a gargantuan audience that it alone lifted Ten to a first place win for the night!

Bones at 8.30 shows no sign of slowing down but CSI, a show that one-time commanded two million plus audiences and was used by Nine to pulverise Ten's sunday night crime double of Criminal Intent and NCIS, was severly embarrased by the ancient Miss Marple on the ABC.

I personally haven't seen Miss Marple on TV since the early 90's but seemingly it keeps plugging on presumably only stopping every so often to change the lead actress (given the character is quite old) Miss Marple took CSI (the Baywatch of crime shows) to the cleaners with her old school sleuthing and made a meal out of all the 9.30 contenders also!

Nine was slightly redeemed in the 10.30 timeslot posting a magnificent 746,000 for a CSI Miami rerun!

A Double-Barrell shot of WTF

That’s right not one but two shocks as the cold weather sets in and the nation gathers around the electronic fireplace.

The first surprise is the behometh average for Ten’s Masterchef pulling an outrageous figure representing a massive 37.56% increase in audience week on week, that huge figure pretty much gave ten the night, with them recording their biggest audience for Rove in quite a while with 1,271,000 tuning in, Ten was only let down by the dissappointing US Biggest Loser which only managed an average of 443,000 viewers for the night.

Seven can be happy with their timeslot winning Bones/Castle duo with Bones recording one of it’s biggest audiences ever (1,349,000) this one time also-ran is now one of Seven’s star performers while former hits either struggle (Grey’s Anatomy) or have dissappeared without a trace (Lost, Prison Break, Heroes).

But the real story of Sunday Night was channel Nine, while CSI is still in the doldrums, a pitiful 771,000 tuned in to a new ep of CSI Miami, the scheduling here is completely baffling – in the past three weeks all three CSI’s have been in this 9.30 slot and none have performed well.

But I digress, the real story was Nine’s strategy to move the anaemic HomeMADE away from their premier night, they replaced it with a new reality skein – Random Act of Kindness. First of all I did not see it – but the haphazard scheduling combined with the cookie cutter concept and Seven & Ten’s dominance of 6.30 in the past few months made me think that we could expect another dissappointing failure.

Not so, Nine’s Random Acts randomly boosted their performance in the slot by a staggering 45.87%, that will probably hold up as the biggest increase of the week. What’s good about it is while Sunday Night dropped in total audience, it’s other competitors Merlin and ABC News both grew week on week meaning Nine’s show succeeded in (as Joe Hockey likes to say) Growing the Pie!

Sunday 14 June 2009
Scoreboard

Going Up
Random Acts of Kindness up 45.87% over HomeMADE
Masterchef up 37.56% week on week
Nine’s Sunday Rugby League up 29.98% week on week
60 Minutes up 27.52%
Nature’s Great Events up 22.53% over Bear Man of Kamchatka
The Simpsons (6pm rebroadcast) up 21.78%
Bones up 20.12%
Rove up 19.45%
3 Act of Murder up 18.59% over Ballet Shoes
Ten News at Five up 18.41%
CSI up 17.65%
Castle up 16.3%
Nine News Sunday up 15.78%
Merlin up 13.32%
CSI: Miami (10.30 episode) up 12.66% over CSI:NY
ABC News up 10.72%
Compass up 10.12%

Going Down
Today on Sunday down 57.79%
Serious Crash Unit down 11.16%
The Biggest Loser (USA) down 10.32%
Weekend Sunrise down 9.64%
Sunday Night down 9.25%

CSI: Time of Death

Sunday 7 June 2009



First of all, Monday is a public holiday - which automatically means that Sunday audiences will be down as people go out to fireworks or nightclubs or whatever. So even though the bulk of shows lost weight over last week it was to be expected, well mostly anyway.

Just like last week Ten did well with Merlin, Masterchef and Rove (and their decision to run Rove long won them the night) and Seven had great success with Sunday Night, Bones and Castle.

But Nine, Nine was having some trouble. Already they chosen to correctly single out HomeMADE a show which was a bit too late to the housing boom, that show is getting banished to Tuesdays, Nine's worst performing night.

But Nine's best minds need to now focus on what the fuck has happened with CSI!


This was once their flagship program, they have a rare commercial advantage with this show in that unlike NCIS, the Law & Orders, Bones, Desperate Housewives and half a dozen other current dramas, Nine is the only place on TV where you can see it. CSI does not show on cable, so it's audience can't be diluted by conventional means.

So what's going on? 810,000 viewers for two new episodes is a disaster! Plain & Simple. 4th place is a major disaster! I'm gonna call it...

Time of death 29 March 2009: that was the airdate of the first episode without Gil Grissom, which seems to be the moment a lot of viewers decided to say goodbye to the show.

Scoreboard

Biggest Drop
The Bear Man Of Kamchatka
ABC1 - 7.30pm
Fell 27% week on week on last week's Doctor Who Special

Biggest Lift
The Biggest Loser USA
Ten - 9.50pm
Rose 3% week on week

Nine Blocked from Success

Sunday 24 May 2009
A very good night last night for both Ten (winning the night with 29.3% of the 5 city audience between 6 and midnight) and Seven, both nets stomping all over Nine’s former stronghold.

The drama, Merlin, had it’s best week yet for Ten rising 127,000 week on week, similarly Masterchef rose 215,000 week on week with what surely must be its biggest aud yet.

Rove even lifted 177,000 week on week. And Biggest Loser (spread over 90 minutes) improved on Harper’s Island which was shifted this week to a post-midnight timeslot.

Seven too found a rising tide with Seven News, Bones and Castle all up by 100 grand week on week. While Nine continues to suffer in silence, with HomeMADE losing a further 28,000 in the face of an improved news lead-in and a lift in the overall available audience. (Remember yesterday’s blog – last Sunday viewers watching broadcast = 4.8 million, last night it went up to 5 million)

Nine will soldier on with HomeMADE because it has to but the Sunday show dropping under a million is a worrying development. I can’t help but feel sorry for them, in 2003 they struck reality gold with The Block, a show perfectly timed to capture the insane orgy of home renovations taking place under a rapidly escalating property market.

The creators of this show were hailed as heroes and the concept talked up by the media as if it were the television equivalent of the second coming, to tell you truth I never watched it, but I know it was popular, that first season managed to net a whopping 2.2 million viewers average to the exploits of those apartment renovators.

Nine tried to emulate what Ten does quite successfully parlaying a reality hit into a long running series, but unlike Ten whose shows are build with profitability in mind, Nine was still huge in the ratings and in the habit of spending $4 to make $5, when the second season didn’t meet up to high expectations (the finally still netted 2.2 million viewers!) they were quick to swing the axe.

Ever since then Nine has been trying to recapture the phenomenal success of The Block, not a season goes by without Nine trotting out the line ‘This is the new “Block”’ or ‘From the creators of “The Block”’, like Al Bundy, fixated on his six touchdown streak in a high school football game, Nine can’t get past the success of this show and it’s holding them back from better things!

High Expectations

Sunday 17 May 2009

Second week in and HomeMADE continues to disappoint just scraping in at the million mark. I know 1 million viewers isn’t anything to sneeze at but for this show in particular it’s not a good thing.

Ever seen a promo for HomeMADE, you know a show has expectations for it when the sponsors’ logos appear in the promo. You know those expectations are huge when there’s about 4 or 5 logos along the bottom of the screen! That’s the kind of sponsor action you only see on big sporting telecasts! So I expect unless this show can pick up over the next 7 weeks then the good people at Nine will be giving away some free spots on their sked to some upset advertisers!

Merlin continues to buck two trends against, a) Scripted Drama before 8.30pm and b) Fantasy/Sci-Television, turning out to be a surprise Sunday night hit for the network, as is Masterchef. In fact Ten would probably kick arse on Sunday nights were it not for failing upstart Harper’s Island, in it’s second week the show dropped 151,000 viewers, I don’t expect it here for a third.

Seven, however, did well will their new starter Castle, the second star vehicle for Nathan Fillion who is familiar to Buffy fans and anyone who made the effort to watch Firefly, though Castle wasn’t as popular as the Bones rerun it replaced (shedding 73,000 viewers week on week) it’s still a promising start for this well promoted show. If only Seven put as much effort into promoting their long running imports (Lost, Desperate Housewives, etc) as they do their shiny new shows.

Realty Reality Bites

Sunday 10 May 2009

Another Sunday, another round of series premieres, this time Nine debuted it’s great white reality (or is realty) hope for 2009: HomeMADE.

It had the perfect lead-in for once Nine’s 6pm news tied Seven in Sydney, won in Melbourne and Adelaide with only Brisbane and Perth letting down the side, but it was a great aud for Nine news which at 6.30 – completely falls away.

HomeMADE from the much ballyhooed creators of The Block lost 471,000 or 31.5% of its lead-in, by contrast Sunday Night, Seven’s current affairs beast lost only 17% from Seven News, was up a whopping 336,000 viewers week on week, within millimetres of a timeslot win and for the first time that I’ve noticed, actually eclipsed 60 minutes in the audience stakes, with the 30 year veteran only managing 1,181,000 off the back of the HomeMADE lead-in.

Ten, however, has the most to smile about, Merlin, a retelling of the medieval tale made all the more better by the lack of Sam Neill represented a massive switch on for ten with an additional 725,000 tuning in after The Simpsons finished, representing a lead-in “retention” of 225%

Now for the real shock, Masterchef, with no Logie awards in its way, raised 376,000 week on week for an average aud of 1,470,000. The Ten reality machine has done it again!

The only thing that prevented them from winning the night was the non-performance of new limited-run serial thriller Harper’s Island, only 576k tuning in at 9.30 for the murder mystery proving that Aussies prefer to see old British geezers get offed, rather than young American hotties! (Well maybe not – I’ll leave that kind of deep cultural analysis to Tribal Mind!)

I wouldn’t be surprised to see this at 10.30 in the coming weeks, the problem is, what the hell do you put after Rove, Rove is, as a show, essentially a late night format, yet it airs at 8.30, Ten have tried just about every format under the sun after this show and nothing seems to take, part of the problem is that once you get to 9.30, the teens start going to bed for school the next day, I don’t know the demographic breakdown of Rove, but I’d imagine they make up a sizable proportion given the audience drop-off that seems to take place no matter what show follows, whatever Ten puts at 9.30 Sundays, they’re going to need something that will entice older adults to switch over from the opposition.

Movies dead but Logies still live

Sunday 3 May 2009

There’s still some life left in the Logie awards, it’s bizarre really that we’re looking at an awards show for a television season that ended more than five months ago, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles I guess, if anything in weather terms, Autumn only really kicked in about a week ago, so I guess you could look at this as the start of the “fall season” for Australian television.

Last night was also the first time that 60 minutes and Sunday night went head to head in all cities and the result was a resounding win (why Nine has never thought of a full time move to 6.30 with the excellent audience flow is beyond me).

Incredibly, despite this great performance, Ten still managed one more big surprise with a huge turnout for the first episode of Merlin, even Masterchef held up alright for its first regular Sunday, the only thing that let Ten down was the bafflingly poor performance of Borat.

Borat now joins the list of films that get copious amounts of press coverage, big response at the box office and on DVD and then flops on free to air (I must compile that list someday!) by contrast two episodes of Bones held up quite well.