3 night weekend

Thursday, 10 February 2011

Well that's just appalling, Thursday is clearly STILL the day where the younger audience deserts the TV in favour of the box office and (in some states) late night shopping.

It has been like this for years, but multichannelling and audience erosion from Foxtel, PVRs, Consoles and the Internet have made it look even worse in recent times.

Nothing after 6.30 even scraped a million viewers.



Looking at the shows themselves, Seven seems to be pitching for younger viewers with How I Met Your Mother and Grey's Anatomy and by an large they're succeeding with those two shows taking the top slots for 18-49 and 16-39. Nine and Ten appear to be tussling over the older viewers with their crime procedurals but there's a bigger similarity between the nets

Save for The Good Wife and RBT, all of these shows are incredibly long in the tooth

Lets look at the stats

The Biggest Loser: 6th Season
How I Met Your Mother: 6th Season
Desperate Housewives: 7th Season
Grey's Anatomy: 7th Season
CSI: 11th Season
Law & Order SVU: 12th Season
Getaway: 20th Season

See a pattern - Thursday's are the TV God's Waiting Room. Shows that for whatever reason are profitible enough to keep going yet no longer the kind of water cooler cool that sustains shows that typically air Sunday - Wednesday

Even digital checks out on a Thursday - and though I'm personally happy to see TNG and The Golden Girls back in prime time, it does point to a night that Free to Air television has largely given up on.

I've been saying for years that Thursday is the new Friday night, but this schedule confirms it. Welcome to the weekend!

It must be fucking bad!

Well - not to be outdone by Wednesdays - Thursday night has seen only one show after 7pm attract the magic million, Cougar Town, which was the subject of a bizarre non-sequiter rant from Seven CEO David Leckie during the week, delivered the good despite the abuse! Looks like Seven has another sitcom hit on their hands.

SVU must have suffered from being pushed back to 9pm (although it's not like people were watching anything else - so maybe they went to bed!) Similarly Medium took a hit for following so late - Ten might do better to start their news at 10pm rather than try to kick off a drama from that point.

Meanwhile the only thing continuing to make the creaking old Getaway look good is the shoddy performance of The White Room, Lets face facts here - if over 250,000 Home and Away watchers are compelled to avoid it - it must be fucking bad!

Fresh funny skeins not stale old laughs

Well this is something new - we're in ratings on a Thursday night and not one show cracks the million mark! In fact not one cracked the 900,000 mark. There were viewers aplenty at 8.30 to watch Seven's sitcoms and SVU on Ten, so what's the go at 7.30.

I can see that the bad press and unsettled timeslot are working against Biggest Loser, I can also see that The White Room (for which I have not seen any promotion) might tank on the basis of being an unknown quantity, but what is going on with Getaway!?

I dare not get my hopes up that this mouldy cheap old Saturday Afternoon snorefest which has been keeping good alternative off Nine's Thursday sked for 18 years now might actually be ready to shuffle off, if only.

Overall channel Nine was very weak last night, the performance of 20 to 1 was remarkably weak last night - it's clear that given the choice of some guaranteed fresh laughs, people will chose that over the stale old clip show.

Even more encouraging was that the value of Thank God You're Here reruns has plummeted with the onetime megahit pulling a pretty average 700,000 in repeat. That show was overrated even when it was a hit.

End of Story

OK - Channel Ten - now would be a good time to panic!

The 7pm Project - 3rd night in experienced a massive drop night on night shedding 18.55% night on night and 31.98% on the premiere two night ago. This is a bad result.

Of course we've seen shows rise and fall on the strength of other shows on their night, and as it stands - Wednesday is not Ten's strongest night.

The Simpsons was the only thing keeping the dream alive for Ten with both episodes scraping in over a million, also Neighbours has some how chiselled out a big following for itself this year parlaying the gravitational pull of Masterchef into what has been a reportedly compelling storyline which has kept viewers with the show - a good result.

But this good news was completely counteracted by what's going on after 8.30.

Law & Order SVU is tanking, the show is a veteran - it's been on our screens since 2000, and arguably it's heyday was in 2003/04 when it gave ER a hiding in the 8.30 Thursday slot, that was the ratings peak and as hard as it is to keep viewers with a serial, it's even harder to convince the aud that's deserted a procedural that they haven't all seen it before - especially when it's main competition is a darker, sexier beast in the form of Criminal Minds.

Even worse is the result for House. The show is still a top draw in America - but ever since the cast was diluted with an extra 3 people they've struggled to hold the interest of Australians.

I think Australian audiences have a good sense of when a show jumps the shark, at least American shows, shows like Murphy Brown, The X Files, Lois & Clark, Beverly Hills 90210, NYPD Blue all vacated primetime very soon after they stopped being relevant. This phenomena still doesn't explain why crap like Getaway or The Footy Show continue unabated, but perhaps Australians are blind to their own shortcomings.

Of course these are just House reruns and scuttlebut says Ten is trying to bed down the timeslot in preparation for September, but an unwavering figure under 600k speaks for itself - the audience has moved on. End of Story.

Elsewhere Nine continued to embarrass itself through bad experiments with reality, this time Australia's Perfect Couple, I'm not even going to give that shit oxygen.

Seven meanwhile didn't pull 1.8 million (The Aud for the sneak peek), but did almost as well with Strictest Parents which gave them the night in overall terms.

ABC dominated the 8.30 hour but The Chaser is well away from its best figures, with next week being the final episode for the series I'm curious to know if ABC will give it any publicity or if the audience will even care?

Finally ACA had one of those rare wins over Today Tonight, again thanks to one of their big ongoing stories this year, the weight loss journey of Magda Szubanski, now if only we can all lose our collective memory of Magda Funny Bits we'll all have something to celebrate!

The Danger of The Mainstream

Wednesday 4 June 2009

Biggest Programming Disappointment
Da Kath & Kim Code
Seven 7.30pm Down 37.93% of Thank God You’re Here and Down 37.58% on Criminal Minds

Biggest improvement
Duh!
State of Origin Rugby League
Nine 8pm – 10pm up 106.87% on The Mentalist and up 77.5% on RPA

Biggest Week on Week Improvement
Law & Order SVU
Ten 8.30pm up 43.58% week on week

First of all, no I didn’t see The Chaser last night, haven’t watched it since it’s return, given that these precious comedians didn’t feel obligated to produce any eps in 2008, I don’t feel particularly obligated to watch them this year, but of course you haven’t been able to turn on the radio or visit a news website without being informed of their latest transgression, which brings me to something I did watch last night…

Family Guy

Last night’s Family Guy was something a little different, a 100th episode compilation, the show mixed best of clips with bizarre commentary from Seth McFarlane and interviews with various focus group members of their opinions on the show.

It was a stark reminder that Family Guy, though successful with it’s target audience, is, in a wider sense, not a successful show, it certainly didn’t appeal to the 40-something people they interviewed for the special, most of them were either offended or at best non-plussed.

It’s funny to me that there was once another show that fit neatly into that category of appealing to 20 somethings and people with a childish sense of humour (myself included).

The Chaser

I first discovered the Chaser on the back of Kath & Kim with their news satire program CNNNN, that show was perhaps a little too focussed on politics and in-jokes to have broad appeal, but then ABC gave them another shot with the War on Everything.

At first a Friday Night skein the show got by on word of mouth alone, for a Friday night show it was like a secret treasure among a sea of mediocrity, ABC saw a show buried at 10pm Fridays after an incompatible lead-in trending up and decided to give it the coveted 9pm Wednesday slot in 2007 (an election year of all years!) the combo was pure alchemy and The Chaser morphed from an underground skein to mainstream hit.

But that mainstream success is strangling the show, last night was just the latest in a long string of incidents that seemed to have shocked the mainstream audience that has been on board since ’07, prior to this there was a major brouhaha over a weird musical number taking a swipe at the cult of dead celebrity, remember the storm that caused.

Personally I understand where a lot of the “angry viewers” are coming from on this – I have kids and jokes about kids in peril cut close to the bone in a way they never did before my parenthood, but I also remember that this sort of edginess is what drew people to the show in the first place. I wonder aloud what this means for the Chaser.

It’s audience was down last night, of course, because of the State of Origin, the Chaser experiencing a 24.16% drop week on week, but beyond that will the show start losing the viewers that brought it into the mainstream, or it persist in a love/hate relationship with the Australian public, or will a third outcome arise where the essence of The Chaser is watered down to appease the mainstream.

That would be sad, Australia already has a once-great team of risk-taking comedians who now just phone in stale comedy week to week getting fat and raking in the cheques…

What ever you do Chaser, don’t turn into Working Dog

Timeslot Flop

Wednesday 28 May 2009

Biggest Disappointment
Law & Order Special Victims Unit
Ten 8.30pm
Down 460,000 viewers on last week’s House season finale

Biggest Improvement
The Chaser’s War on Everything
ABC1 9pm
Up 228,000 viewers on last week’s Gruen Transfer season finale

Well The Chaser is back and in ratings terms at least (haven’t watched the ep yet, but I’ve heard some worrying things) it was a success.

The ABC’s comedy double caused some headaches for the commercial networks, well actually know that’s not accurate – it caused some headaches for channel ten. The very people who form Ten’s core audience all flee to the ABC at 8.30 whilst Ten is now playing a game of crime show chicken which it cannot seem to win!

You’ve heard of the phrase “timeslot hit” it was common parlance in the 90’s when NBC had a Thursday night comedy lineup consisting of Friends at 8pm and Seinfeld at 9pm, the joke was they could stick a test pattern at 8.30 and 9.30 and they would still be in the top ten for the week!

Well now we have a new term – a “timeslot flop!”

SVU has been put headlong against two crime dramas and the ABC’s most watched hour all week.

One of factors working against House in this slot was that it was a 5 year old show against two relative newbies, Criminal Minds in its fourth season is arguably at the peak of its powers, House had a refit back in season 4 and it has seen the show stumble with Australian audiences, Criminal Minds has had only one cast change (in season 3 Joe Mantegna subbing for Mandy Patinkin) and hasn’t skipped a beat, rookie drama The Mentalist is one of the year’s few shining lights out of the US.

Now Ten is replacing House with an even older drama, SVU is in its 10th season and unlike other Law & Order shows the cast of SVU have remained with the show throughout its run and the show is more character based than its sibling shows.

The 9.30 episode of SVU actually increased over the 8.30 one by 165k and over the previous week’s Numb3rs by 200k, it took Cold Case down by 110k week on week and My Name is Earl down by 114k. There is one conclusion I can draw from this, people like SVU still, there’s an audience for it – but at 8.30 that audience is watching other shows, SVU probably won’t cut through that clutter.

The only thing that could help Ten out here is that Nine and Seven will very soon be running out of episodes of their skeins, both having been fast-tracked last year, maybe Ten should put up some SVU reruns until then!

One final note, remember we're still waiting for this great new channel seven audience to surface Working Dog. If it wasn't for SVU, Seven would have recorded the night's biggest drop with Thank God You're Here plummeting 169,000 viewers week on week! Well done chumps!

Numb3rs you don't want to see

Wednesday 13 May 2009

Another Wednesday night win to Seven last night. Although Thank God You’re Here was down slightly on previous performance, their post 8.30 figures lifted with Criminal Minds up 32,000 and a couple of people meters behind The Gruen Transfer, while My Name is Earl was up 64,000 viewers and Family Guy up a healthy 105,000. After a shaky start this post 9.30 lineup is beginning to acquit itself, it’s still down on Seven’s older skewing fare but with old skewing fare everywhere else they need to make up ground on the young demographics where they often miss out.

As a rabid fan of Lost I considered the intrusion of Ponderland to be an affront to people everywhere who took up this show in 2005, but I have to admit waiting around between Family Guy and Lost this odd little show has grown on me.

Also up at 9.30 was Cold Case which added 141,000 viewers week on week, all these shows are benefiting from Numb3rs a 4 year veteran for Ten which has never performed that well (usually hovering around the 800,000 mark) I would remind Ten that this is the second 9.30 show that is woefully underperforming for them, a few years ago they pulled Smallville from a 7.30 timeslot when it was getting 1 million viewers! Now they’re allowing all sorts of failure in the 9.30 slots.

Perhaps they’re hoping for a boost when the stronger SVU comes online in a few weeks to battle for the 8.30 slot, perhaps this is just warming the bench for Rush which will need a timeslot very soon if they’re going to run 22 episodes.

House also suffered an embarrassing fall dropping 91,000 viewers week on week and back under the 900,000 mark, similarly The Simpsons fell 107,000 viewers week on week making Wednesday a bad night for Ten.

It was, however, a great night for Nine, achieved somewhat at its own expense. A Current Affair ran an interview with NRL Footy Show Star/Melbourne Storm Coach Matthew Johns about a 2002 incident dissected by the ABCs Four Corners on Monday night.

That program has cost Johns two jobs and whatever good reputation preceded him. Whether its deserved or not I’m sure there are people more qualified than I to judge, but what amazes me is that Nine stands him down, he fronts up for an interview! Think about that – if you were given the sack and your employer turned around and asked you to humiliate yourself in front of the customers? Would you?

Nine should cut the guy a cheque – his bad behaviour gave the program a rare win over Today Tonight and a week on week boost of 277,000 viewers. Now it remains to be seen if this train wreck can revive interest in the NRL Footy Show – don’t hold your breath…

Abusing the fans

Thursday 7 May 2009
Lots of big changes on the Ten sked last night and not the same level of success.

Rules of Engagement, a sitcom which has had two curtailed seasons (it was a midseason launch then ran head on into the WGA Writer’s Strike) returned to less than spectacular numbers allowing Nine and Seven to divide the hour amongst themselves with Bondi Vet falling away on the back of a poor lead-in.

Criminal Intent returned to SVU like ratings, but beaten handsomely by a 20 to 01 rerun, the 8.30pm hour was hotly contested last night with 4,322,000 people tuned in across the hour, the ABC benefiting from a retrospective special on Media Watch, a 15 minutes a week that tabloid journalists dread and a show whose attention from the news media is inversely proportional to its miniscule running time! The special pulled 911,000 viewers, one of Aunty’s best performances in this slot all year.

Medium moved nights to Thursdays, dropping from last week’s occupant (an SVU rerun) by 154,000 viewers but improving on Life on Mars’ sliding ratings and improving on its own ratings which were stuck under 700,000 on a low viewing Friday night. After last night there are 7 episodes left in the current season, after which they could virtually rerun the show in this slot for the rest of the year and it would probably produce a similar, if not better, number.

Medium’s debut adversely affected Private Practice. Last night I actually sat through an episode of Grey’s Anatomy to see whether I was missing anything (and no I wasn’t) but a new disturbing trick I noticed was that Grey’s Anatomy faded to black (no logo, or EP credit or anything) and then bang, right onto Private Practice, there was no promo for next week’s episode just a jarring jump to the next show.

To whoever is in charge of playout at the Seven network – this is abuse of the fans of this show – and I hasten to add, I am not one of them, but if my favourite show ended on a dramatic note and I didn’t get that space of the credits, or a promo to decompress and reflect on what I just saw, well that’s just low.

I get accelerated flow, In fact I’m a big fan of the kind of accelerated flow that American Networks practiced in the 90’s, back then the credits were all uniform (and yes off to one side, but legible) a promo for a related show would play and then you’d get a quick bumper to flag the next program, none of this jumping straight onto the next show – that is just arse.

So faceless Seven executive, just think about what you’re doing, by denying Grey’s Anatomy fans their show as a whole, you’re not only turning them away but you’re also hurting the prospects of the show you’re trying to promote, just look at the ratings (especially for Private Practice) it isn’t working!

Finally congrats to the AFL Footy Show had a big victory at 9.30 mostly thanks to some sort of heavily publicised stunt where Sam Newman got tarred and feathered! Meanwhile one of the stars of the NRL version seems to had serious allegations made against them to be aired at a future date on Four Corners – would somebody just can the Rugby League version already!

The Beginning is the End is the Beginning

Thursday 30 April 2009

A fairly substandard night all around with only Seven's news hour pulling any significant amount of viewers.

A Double of Law & Order SVU was an immediate ratings improvement over the 9.30 edition of Life on Mars with an additional 238,000 viewers for Ten at 9.30.

Bondi Vet gained 127,000 viewers week on week assuring this slow startup of a second season, I wonder whether they'll wait to 2010 or try to pump out another bunch of eps this year?

Masterchef continues the Biggest Loser's Modus Operandi of struggling at 7pm and flourishing after 7.30, overall the show is holding steady but the 7pm figure is a worry, a few more weeks and we'll see whether that's tied to low viewership on a Thursday or some other more compelling reason.

Ten needs Masterchef to fire because in TV switch on is everything, Nine and Seven have big switch-ons at 6pm, whereas Ten's 6pm aud is typically half of Seven's making the 7pm show all the more important.

Over on Seven it's time to ask the question - is this what they going for? An entire primetime under 1 million, the once great Grey's Anatomy barely holding onto viable, the spinoff stuck in second gear unable to get out from under the lead in (a lot like the just concluded Life)

It's weird that less than 5 years after rescusitating their anaemic Thursday nights (remember they gave up and started screening first run movies on Thursdays in 2004 before striking it lucky with Lost in 2005) they've ended up right back where they started.

Good News, Bad News - Thursday 2 April 2009

A Week on Week comparison for channel Ten obviously sees ten down without the aid of AFL footy but away from that schedule upheaval Ten has some good news and some bad news...

The Good News
Law & Order SVU got the better of Nine's 20 to 01 with probably its biggest audience of the season, helped along by (of all things) Bondi Vet!

Dr Chris Brown is finally over the million mark and no doubt a second season confirmation is only a formality.

For a show which is not a typical Ten format (and has therefore struggled for attention) it has grown consistently each week. Last year it seemed like the whole "Bondi" franchise would be dead on the tarmac with the abject failure of Bondi Rescue Bali, but the success here must surely be encouraging someone to hunt for the next Bondi reality skein, Crime & Investigation channel looked like they were getting in on the act last Thursday with The Bondi Gay Murders, but that was just a one-off CIA ep!

The Bad News
Oh Yeah - the disruption (two pre-emptions for AFL matches so far this season) has not been a good thing for Life on Mars which this week finished its run in the US, not sure if this show will see the other side of easter at 9.30 - we may be looking at a 10.30 move.

Some are even suggesting a Friday night swap with Medium (Personally I would swap out the male-skewing Law & Order to take it away from male-skewing sports), other have reasonably pointed out that Ten has not been so quick on the trigger this year - and that is true - but remember they still moved Dexter out of prime time and in a few weeks Guerilla Gardeners (which has been treading water at 700k) is moving to 6pm Sundays (replacing a low-rating Simpsons rerun) so even though Ten is more patient this year, I still think Life on Mars may see out its run in a different slot.

Thursday 19 March 2009

Just a quick post - Life on Mars continues to slip down 28 grand while it's lead in SVU was up 44 grand and pulled off a timeslot win against a much weaker 20 to 01 (down a massive 176,000 viewers)

The other thing to note is Bondi Vet, up into safe territory with 962,000 viewers (up 56,000 week on week) and not at the expense of other shows either with all 7.30 skeins up on last week. Perhaps there is a place at ten for dull factual shows after all!

I’ll see you when you get there – Thursday 26 February 2009

As a guy who goes through the ratings on a daily basis nothing is more infuriating than sorting through the mess when networks decided to program city by city and now that Football season is starting up the game of shows being pre-empted in some markets or bumped in others begins. Usually this sort of nonsense is confined to weekends where nobody cares because only movies are scheduled anyway – but on a few occassions the practice spills over to weeknights, and last night was one of those nights.

It produced a good result for Ten with the combo of crime show and football allowing them to dominate the post 8.30 timeslots. But in the last few weeks they’ve tended to dominate them anyway – which is the ral rub for Ten – I’m sure if they could chose to pre-empt a weeknight it would be Monday or Wednesday – not Thursday which is generally successful. Southern viewers of Life on Mars will get a double episode next week so they can catch up but there’s no word on when Ten will air the pre-empted SVU episode skipping it for the time being in the southern states, this is the annoying factor with state based programming.

The absence of Life on Mars in some markets handed almost 100,000 extra viewers to CSI Miami – ordinarily that sort of shift would be something to worry about, but in a few weeks CSI Miami makes way for The Footy Show which will make the choice easier for viewers in this slot.

Meanwhile over at Seven their Thursday night tentpole Grey’s Anatomy seems to be on the decline – relegated to third place on a low viewing night. To Seven’s credit they are trying to bring a new audience to Thursdays but it doesn’t look like anyone’s biting.

It’s worse news for Private Practice which lost 72,000 viewers week on week, no doubt those were the few remaining men watching before they checked out altogether, Seven will probably tolerate this show in this slot for a while longer – but I’m starting to wonder how they would go if they swapped this with the far superior Scrubs which follows it.