Big Bang and the Big Hitters

Sunday, 27 February 2011

The 7.30 hour on Sunday nights is turning into one of the most competitive of the week, the week 60 minutes was the timeslot winner and Bondi Rescue posted its best audience of the year so far (for a well promoted episode I'll note).



Last Week Modern Family was the victor at 7.30 whereas the week before it was The Force. Every one of the shows at 7.30 is attracting a healthy audience. If only the same could be said about 8.30.

A few weeks ago you could point to Seven's Bones and see how they're dominating the timeslot - then ABC had to wheel out that old bitty Miss Marple, I'm guessing it's not the same Miss Marple I remember seeing as a kid (yes it's been going that long) but 1 million viewers is a very good audience for the ABC and proof that while every other demographic in TV is eroding the old folks are sticking to their free to air TV.

Maybe it's time to address television's cult of youth where every show is tailored to 25-54 or 18-49, then again, this same Audience targeting allows us to have multichannels these days.

On the multichannel front the main news was Ten bumped Smallville to a 10.30 slot replacing it with a movie which did way better and liften Ten's share. NZ Next Top Model is still struggling - but so does everything against Big Bang and the big hitters on the main channels at 7.30

Tolerance

Sunday, 20 February 2011

Lots going on last night with every network having a turn at a timeslot win (the Blue boxes) Particularly impressive was the performance of Miss Marple on the ABC as well as Modern Family on Ten (probably helped by a very funny promo this last week)



Digital went well for Nine and 7 with big numbers for The Big Bang Theory and Escape to the Country, but the best Eleven could muster was 115K for Everybody Loves Raymond, the rest of their night bombed.

How much longer are Ten going to tolerate Smallville pulling in less than 100K per outing? Even more disturbing - how long will they tolerate the lacklustre numbers from NCIS Los Angeles at 9.30 on the main channel.

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!