Oh Mr Sheen

Thursday, 24 February 2011

It's just depressing isn't it, we should just close Thursdays down and forget about it.



You may have noticed if you're reading this blog on a regular basis that I've chosen to ignore Fridays and Saturdays, that's mostly down to the fact that apart from the smaller audiences, the schedules start to get ridiculously fragmented as different states follow their different football codes. A few years ago (and you can rifle through the posts in 2009 to check it out) I attempted to make sense of this haphazard scheduling, but I don't even think the networks themselves know if there's a net benefit to splitting up their schedule by state.

It will be interesting to see if this is the first year where the multichannels can carry the sport live into the outlier states when it comes to NRL and AFL.

As for Thursday night, The Biggest Loser and Home and Away are the only things anyone is tuning in for.

Look at Two and a Half Men at 7pm - only half a million viewers and now getting regularly beaten by Ten's 7pm project despite having a superior lead in - Nine needs an alternative 7pm show pronto and they must know it - it's dragging down their whole night.

The problem for Nine is - What can they put in there - not a game show - they're played out, there's no other broad appeal sitcom that has as much strip potential as Men and a new newsprogram up against ABC News and 7pm would be fatal.

There's always Entertainment Tonight or TMZ I guess (I'd totally watch TMZ if it was on at a decent time like a few years ago) or maybe Nine could be brave and kick off their nightly sked at 7pm rather than 7.30, maybe that's too brave. Whatever happens they will not tolerate low figures for Two and a Half Men for that much longer - they need an alternative soon!

While I'm on the subject - What the hell is going on with Charlie Sheen check out this story on TV Tonight I think Sheen is going off the rails and it wouldn't suprise me if Two and a Half Men has taped its last show.

My Kitchen Pwns

Wednesday, 9 February 2011

I had no idea that My Kitchen Rules was supposed to be on 3 nights a week - but why not with ratings like this - the reality skein just goes from strength to strength taking out not only the Biggest Loser - knocking it under a million but also (incredibly) a new episode of The Big Bang Theory.



Big Bang's lead-out, Mike & Molly held up well considering the depressed lead-in and Farmer Wants a Wife actually improved on the figure slightly but Nine won't be happy with its performance.

Indeed given the amount of advanced promotion (an admittedly stupid promo though) that Farmer has received compared to Criminal Minds - they really got shafted.

Almost tying Farmer Wants a Wife for second in the slot was the new Adam Hill's show which posted a really good (for the ABC) 889K.

City Homicide will soon be drawing a chalk outline around itself with a woeful 663K but then again nothing at 9.30 did that well even the usually reliable RPA faltered with only 744,000.

On digital Neighbours was again the top show with 7TWO's British dramas and All New Simpsons rounding out the top five - look at how an all new Simpsons ep reduces the audience for Family Guy by 50,000 viewers!

Finally it's worth noting that Two and a Half Men lost 140,000 from ACA and came fourth in its slot behind the 7PM Project, Nine might have to start looking for a 7PM alternative which is not going to be easy.

AFL Monday Night game is a ratings dog

Channel Seven had a shocker last night and you can put it down to 3 letters... A.F.L.

The Australian Football League is only popular in Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory - that's one really big state, two smaller ones and two tiny ones, the other two really big states worship at the altar of Rugby League.

This creates a headache for the good folks in television - you see Television is a national business bu these sports are only successful in their home markets, despite the efforts of people to market the other code outside their home territories they largely go unnoticed.

The end result is that when the AFL is playing in Melbourne and Adelaide and Perth - the broadcaster has to find something else for the people in Sydney and Brisbane to watch.

This isn't a major problem on weekends, the AFL's natural primetime home is on Friday and Saturday nights, most nets just run movies on these nights so they can easily shuffle things around without disrupting their schedule in any great way, but lately the AFL has been encroaching on Monday nights eyeing off a prize of bigger licence fees in future rights negotiations for the promise of more prime-time matches.

Only problem with this is Monday nights. Despite the overall decline in TV viewership, Monday is no Friday or Saturday - the nets wheel out some of their biggest shows on this night, Nine with their big name comedies and dramas, Ten with Masterchef (well that every night I guess) and Good News Week and even Seven with their factuals and female-skewing soaps.

Last night Seven had the hot potato carrying a match between St Kilda and Carlton. Melbourne viewers missed out on The Zoo, Adelaide viewers lost Find My Family and nobody saw Desperate Housewives.

Arguably Seven showed a level of uncommon shrewdness by pre-empting Housewives and Brothers & Sisters, avoiding last year's idiotic situation where the south was several weeks behind the north on airdates, but the replacement, a rerun of the movie Knocked Up in Sydney and Brisbane got severely knocked around by the competition.

What's even worse is the performance of the AFL match itself - normally this kind of disruption is justified because the result in the southern states makes up for the low performance in the north - not this time - look at the numbers:

Melbourne Top Shows
1 Masterchef 541k
2 Nine News 494k
3 ACA 446k
4 TT 427k
5 Two and a Half Men 424k
6 Seven News 413k
7 Two and a Half Men (r) 393k
8 The Mentalist 385k
9 The Big Bang Theory 384k
10 AFL 371k

That's right 10th place for the night

The situation is worse in Adelaide where the top program, Masterchef, drew 208k, Good News Week came in at number 10 with 115,000, even the 7pm project polled better at 13th position with 100k leaving the AFL in 15th place with a low 88,000 viewers

In Perth it was compounded by not even being close to live - they pulled 82,000 and 21st place for the night beaten by tough competition like 6pm Simpsons, ABC News and Deal or no Deal!

Well here's my tip for Seven, Ten and any other potential rights holder - if another one of these Monday night games comes up, kick it Foxtel and stick to your regular schedule, the monday night game is a dog - and it's not worth the damage to your night.



Only

Mondayitis

Masterchef is breathing new life in Ten's previously moribund 7pm project (966,000) - something that The Biggest Loser was unable to do.

The question is how many of these people are just waiting around for Masterchef to start - we saw similar spikes last year with Neighbours' figures as Masterchef's lead in (though nothing as consistent as 7pm's improvement it must be noted)

Worryingly there is no halo effect for Neighbours and even more worryingly no impact on Good News Week which was polling better in total people earlier in the season, still it won the timeslot in the 18-49 demographic which is Ten's major focus these days.

Still it's a world of difference to Seven stuck with Mondayitis will all of their post Home & Away shows coming down under the million mark - Home & Away is also underwhelming given that it's longest serving cast member just walked away with the Gold Logie the night before.

Nine keeps chugging along nicely with good numbers for all their primetime shows and the continuing good performance of Hot Seat and Nine News versus Seven's Deal or no Deal/Seven News combo.

Today also pulled off a close win against Sunrise 386,000 to 370,000 mostly due to people hoping to see a repeat performance of Karl Stefanovic's legendary post-logies stint last year - I know I was - and I was thouroughly dissappointed in his sobriety :(

The 7pm Project: Not Bad Enough

Woah, My Kitchen Rules has very quickly gone from rip-off suspect to hit in a short space of time. Monday's figure of 1.47 million is the show's biggest aud so far and the first time it has won the 7.30 half hour.

It seems more people would rather be eating food than going without it, because while Seven was feasting on people meters, fifth season veteran the Biggest Loser was starving for attention, dropping to a woeful 678,000 viewers, which I'm pretty certain is an all time series low (or at least very close to it).

Alarm bells should ringing at channel ten right about now because the abject failure of the 7pm project is dragging down one of their flagship shows.

A few weeks ago I was of the belief that ten would stick with 7pm in the hopes that the Masterchef juggernaut would revive it when it rolled into town - but now that Seven has offered viewers an alternative to the cooking comp, they may just drop ten's show like a hot potato - especially given that 7pm seems to be doing its level best to drive viewers away.

So what's wrong with the 7pm project? Well, there are all sorts of nitpicky reasons floating around on the net like the short unsatisfying segments or people's personal dislike of certain cast members (Hughes and Pickering in particular are polarising figures) but the show is genuinely different to its immediate competition and it's not a bad way to pass a half hour, indeed the effort made to draw in mature viewers with guests like George Negus and Andrew Bolt has to be applauded, so why is the show losing steam?

Well, strip shows are not appointment television per se, they are habitual television, what other explanation is there for perfectly sane, reasonable adults watching night after night of Home & Away or A Current Affair, it's their habit, like smoking.

I'm of the opinion that habits have to be bad for you, they're a ritual self abuse, smoking, drinking, swearing - these are all damaging activities, we all know better, but we do these things in spite of ourselves.

It might be a better practice to watch PBS Newshour in the afternoon and wash it down with Lateline at 10.30 but where's the fun in that - where's the insidiously cynical plotting and bad dialogue? (Home and Away) Where's the chance to gawk at a celebrity satirising the worst aspects of his personality? (Two and a Half Men) Where's the shonky snake oil salesmen, biggest bra sizes and simmering (yet manufactured) outrage?

7pm, put simply, has no guilty pleasures, it's not stupid, or embarrassing, there's no exposes or puffed up self importance, there not even snark - most of the jokes are delivered in a PC good-natured fashion.

It's earnest, and that's not a good quality for TV, maybe kids TV, but then no-one ever got hooked on Totally Wild...

Lose some weight

Monday nights have been in place for two weeks now and there were very few changes, Nine’s Monday comedies came off a little from their premiere figures, Big Bang was beaten in its slot by Australian Story.

The 7pm Project was up slightly, but disastrously The Biggest Loser went down by 17% the biggest drop on the night.

Without following TBL this year I can’t say if the drop is due to the content of the show, perhaps it’s the target audience, a lot of whom would also be amenable to watching Seven’s My Kitchen Rules which only airs twice a week to Loser’s six times!

I don’t know about you but if I were an avid reality viewer with limited time on my hands I might splice it between the two shows.

The moral of this story is – now that it’s at 7.30 – The Biggest Loser could possibly stand to lose some weight!

Of course the greater moral could be to move it back to 7pm where it will enjoy a greater install base and therefore better ratings.

Of course – that opens up the final half of the year problem, but so far 7pm isn’t proving to be the solution!

The 7pm Reject

You know how I could tell that I'd barely watched any free to air TV over the summer - I was genuinely shocked to come across Grey's Anatomy last night! Seven's decision to bring this to Tuesdays seems to be a good one as the series struggled to get attention on the older skewing Thursday night.

Ten meanwhile continues to sink, the 7pm project barely scraped past half a million viewers, you'd wonder how far Ten's "commitment" to this show extends. Despite being the only fresh material in its timeslot over summer it actually went backwards and a general lift in audiences hasn't helped at all.

7pms performance seems to be affecting not only Neighbours before it but the Biggest Loser afterward. Although Loser has always performed better after 7.30 than before - this year it seems to be struggling and given its start time against varied competition, viewers may find it easier to opt out in deference to other 7.30 shows, that if they'd started watching at 7pm.

Unfortunate Reality

After opening on Sunday night with a quite respectable 1.1 million viewers the Biggest Loser plummeted on its second outing falling more than 300,000 viewers in the process.

While it certainly wasn't helped by its lead in the anaemic 7pm Project (674,000 viewers and a distant fourth) a bigger problem may be the controversy surrounding one of the contestants who is up on some very unsavoury criminal charges, subsequently that contestant has had to be excised from the show in the editing room which is reportedly causing all sorts of headaches for viewers trying to follow a narrative jumping around more than your garden variety Tarantino film.

Ten just can't take a trick with their reality shows of late, last year's public lynching of Kyle Sandilands completely sucked the oxygen out of Australian Idol, now this story which is just off putting and unfortunate - what's next? Maybe a Masterchef contestant turns out to be a cannibal!!

Speaking of Masterchef, Seven's cash-in-o-rama had an uninspired sampling given the amount of promotion the show has gotten over summer, perception is working against them with this show - it feels like it's ripping of masterchef and it feels like it's ripping of My Restaurant Rules, still it did better than Loser so it could turn out very nicely for Seven.

Nine meanwhile steamrolled everyone else with their comedies and (lo and behold) a consistently programmed hour of The Mentalist all timeslot winners!

Monday Rant

Monday Night’s Ratings in a nutshell, delivered by a nutjob…

This folks is 7 O’clock. It’s been like this for months, age old reruns of Two and a Half Men scraping over the top of the ancient Home & Away with ABC News in a respectable third place and 7pm Project close to cancelled – except it’s not.

You’d think if 7pm had any hope of a boost it would be the night after Rove McManus quit his show and everyone missed it! But nope, no dice.

You don’t think that it could get much worse than 674,000 viewers but the overcooked Jamie Oliver proved that you could losing another 29,000 viewers in what is a staggeringly bad figure for 7.30 Monday.

Oliver’s shows were snared by Ten back in 2003 during a particularly lean period for them, and they were a modest success, already having generated buzz on the ABC, but Oliver peaked with his Australian based show (the restaurant from which, Fifteen, is still operating incidentally) and his popularity has waned here ever since.

Andrew Denton, however, continues to be evergreen with his new show, launched with scant promotion pulled almost 1 million viewers in a 44% increase over its lead-in

Flashforward continues to be the show that could, hanging in there at a million despite the predictions of everyone with a pen that it will drop off the face of the earth (just like Heroes, Lost, Prison Break et al) so far they’re hanging on but the real test will be after they have a break in the summertime.

Good News Week meanwhile, continues as Ten’s one bright spot posting a 39% increase on its lead-in against tough competition.

Roving On

What were they thinking?

That’s the first thing that sprung to mind on Monday morning as I sat in traffic (in my car, not out on the road) hearing the news that Rove McManus ended his show with next to zero notice.

It’s one thing to leave television – it’s quite another to do it on your own terms. It’s a completely different thing altogether to do it and almost not tell anyone! We’re in Dave Chappelle territory now!

I’m a little sad that I didn’t know it was going to happen – I have watched the show on and off since it’s commencement all the way back on channel nine. It was an off period for me, helped along by the launch of two new digital channels (GO! and 7TWO) and, last night, the launch of several new channels on Foxtel to keep me distracted!

So it’s sad and annoying that they didn’t promote it as the last one – but what of the decision itself? What does it mean?

Did Rove jump, or was he pushed? That’s the big question hanging in the air after this – everyone with something official to say on the matter will say that he jumped, and while he may have been the one who ultimately pulled the plug, I think there were some very compelling reasons to so.

The Show itself
Rove’s show, has not had a good year. In ratings terms it has been on the skids ever since Australian Idol surfaced but even prior to this – it’s only high notes were thanks to a lead-in from the all-conquering Masterchef.

The show’s other major problem has been the dilution of its talent with Dave Hughes and Carrie Bickmore moving to the 7pm Project.

The Sunday Night conundrum
4 years ago, Rove Live was on Tuesday nights at 9.30, in that timeslot it regularly posted sub 800,000 figures off the back of a weak lead-in The O.C. Ten solved this problem by moving Rove to Sunday’s at 8.30 – instantly giving his show a better lead-in and freeing up Tuesdays to be conquered by NCIS.

But the 8.30 timeslot created it’s own problem, talk-shows, by their nature, start off strong at the top of the hour and then trail off as the hour goes on, when you devote a chunk of your show to interviews then audience drop-off is inevitable – some people are just there for the comedy segments.

In the three years that Rove has been on Sundays Ten have not found anything remotely suitable to follow it, sitcoms= bomb, sketch comedy = bomb, NCIS reruns = bomb, fast-track US dramas = bomb, Dexter = bomb, Reality shows = bomb.

Ten’s biggest problem on Sundays for three years has been the 9.30 slot – and the cause of that problem is obvious, the lead-in. Rove at 8.30 is not a good lead in.

So here you have a situation where the show was tanking at 9.30, but the show does alright at 8.30 yet everything after it tanks

Roving Enterprises
In past years it has been noted that Rove was always safe at channel ten because he provides them with a plethora of programming across their schedule, that has certainly been true – it is still true now but some of the paint has come off. Look at the run-down.

The ARIA Awards
Rove had produced this show for years but this year Nine has the rights (for reasons I cannot fathom) so that’s off the table

The 7pm Project
Ten have thrown their weight behind this show and IMO it’s a good show, I hope it does well, there is conjecture that Rove has finished his own show to concentrate on 7pm which is a production on a much bigger scale.

The show struggles to stay above 700,000 viewers a night and is hampering ten’s post 7.30 sked, though not to the extent of last year’s Taken Out.

It is hoped that the show will pick up over summer with Home & Away out of the picture.

Before the Game
This show rates really well in Melbourne and Adelaide, I don’t even know if they get it in Perth and in the northern states it shows on Channel One because over there it’s a niche concern.

Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?
They wrung three seasons out of this show and when I saw wrung I mean wrung – at it’s send off this year there was about 600,000 people watching – at 7.30 on a Monday night.

When you look at this bigger picture you can see a production empire that’s appears to be on thin ice, with these ratings they could go from 4 shows to none over the summer. You can already bet that 5th Grader has been axed.

I think that Rove has decided to concentrate his efforts on 7pm (potentially the most lucrative of all the shows) I wish him the best of luck.

Despressing Stuff

Somedays you look at these charts and get depressed, I mean look at it...

Two and a Half Men, a rerun at that, is pulled out for it's 10th showing in the space of a week and equals the new hit World's Strictest Parents

This stellar performance does nothing for the lead out which more than halves the audience, if Australia's Perfect Couple teaches us anything - it's that no-one likes perfection.

The Librarians and Tara stumble badly - in fact the trend this week seems to be audiences deserting post 9.30 shows left right and centre, a worrying trend given there's no holidays, good weather or ashes to pin the blame on.

Law & Order UK continues the hex on Ten's Wednesday night - remember when Ten owned Wednesdays with The X Files, and then again with The Guardian, and then again with House? They desperately need a boost on this night - Celebrity Masterchef at 7.30 might do them some good - but as we can see in various spots on the grid - the lead-ins mean nothing.

Over at 7pm - the 7pm Project seems to have settled on a stable number now - though there's problems with it, mainly the beating it's taking in demos against Seven and Nine in the slot - Ten needs to find a hook to promote the show because despite the content having improved the ratings have not (although they have at least stabilised).

Criminal Minds is one of a handful of shows doing well whether it's new or rerun, also NCIS and Two and a Half Men fit this bill, but check back in two years for the inevitable erosion when not even new fasttracked eps will break a mill - that's my prediction

See - it's easy to look at the results and get depressed...

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?

Leading in to something

You know, this year I'm becoming increasingly convinced that lead-ins mean next to nothing and two things bear that out on last night's ratings

The New Adventures of Old Christine
Nine decided, finally, to wheel this show out for another go behind yet another episode of Two and a Half Men (surely people have seen them that many times now they're burned onto the inside of their retinas at this stage!)

A crowd of over 1 million sat through an hour of Two and a Half Men and then promptly left! Having not seen the particular episode to judge, I can however say that Christine is a slow burn type of show which takes some viewing to get into - but is Nine going to have any patience when this show posted a figure 17% worse than the previous one week wonder Dance Your Ass Off!

That one show sent the rest of Nine's night down the proverbial - with even the resilient 20 to 01 buckling under pressure (and a timeslot change).

Talkin Bout Your Generation
Week on Week the 7pm project dropped 26.75% yet Generation actually rose 2% with 1.6 million.

Lead-ins are less of a factor than ever before and the audience is less patient and more fickle than ever!

Lots of sex jokes but no Big Bang

Well last night the main action was going on in the 7.30 hour.

Two and a Half Men is enjoying a resurgence but The Big Bang Theory suffered badly dropping a staggering 492,000 from Two and a Half Men, that's a 35.6% drop from the lead-in and a 17.29% drop week on week.

Puzzlingly Big Bang's faltering did nothing to the figures for Sea Patrol which tracked line ball week on week.

Australian Story is having a good run of late - improving 19.37% week on week, the flow-on even helped Four Corners over a million.

The return of Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? did well but it remains to be seen if that was from the Matt Preston appearance or loyalists to the show, certainly it was the only shining light for ten on a harsh night: 7pm was down an upsetting 40.54% week on week, Ten is in for the long haul but a deeper analysis shows losses in all younger demographics, meanwhile the performance of Two and a Half Men and Home and Away speak for themselves - both above 1.3 million for the night.

Ten now has two very hard tasks on it's hands - developing this show on the run so people will watch it and then (the harder part) somehow attracting people BACK to watch it.

Good luck!

Just a flesh wound

Umm Ten's looking a bit blue of late

At the start of the week I wrote

when Neighbours is your top rating show - you're in trouble

Well, last night they went one lower - their top show was the 6pm Simpsons with a measley 687,000 viewers - the 7pm project dropped into no-mans land at 656,000 granted the network has thrown it's support behind the show and it's early days - but tell that to the staff at Nine's 'This Afternoon' who met their fate with little over two weeks under their belt in a show which was talked up to the nines from the get go.

We'll see if the 7pm figures are indicative of Ten's general day to day health (ie: strong on Mondays and Tuesdays, weak on their lower rating days) or if it's the show itself.

At 588k - Ten cannot afford to have Dance lead off it's night - just put Simpsons or Futurama in there or better yet Move the dancing show to a slot where it can't cause damage.

QandA - the last to arrive

A quick one for Thursday night.

Seven virtually refreshed their whole lineup with decent results.

Amazing Race at 7.30 did quite well (incredibly bettered by the undead Getaway) and the two new comedies both tagged over 1 million viewers, although third in the slot with Rush maintaining it's first week figures without any problems.

Also good for Ten was that Criminal Intent improved week on week by 16.62% for a timeslot win.

If only it was that good for Ten across the night. The 7pm project claims to be waving not drowning - but I'm starting to wonder - it still posts a timeslot win in 16-39 but that's not what Ten is aiming for and as a result the 7.30 ep of Rules of Engagement was way down only climbing back up for the second ep at 8pm - both half hours are mediocre raters even by Ten's standards.

Finally - what's the deal with Q&A - It's back - I didn't even realise it - and neither did most of it's audience by the look of it - the show was well down on it's average - outrated by the ABC's 6pm program (among others). The ABC didn't put much promotional energy into the series return - hopefully the word will filter through in the coming weeks that the show is back - one of the more lively current affairs programs in recent times.

The Danger Zone

Ahhhhh

That sound you can here is Seven and Nine breathing a sigh of relief.

The behometh has rolled away and finally their shows are seeing some sunlight!

Sea Patrol lifted nicely with a double installment sustaining over the million mark giving Nine the night.

With Masterchef gone the 7.30pm rerun of Two and a Half Men rose to 1.4million proving it aint over yet for the oversaturated sitcom.

Seven had a decent night but the 8pm rerun of Scrubs was a rare low point for them sliding into fourth place with comedy viewers opting for an all new Big Bang Theory - in one of the biggest outings yet for the sophomore skein.

So what about Ten.

Ten is now in that danger zone, the second half.

It's worth taking a look back to this time last year to see how ten was faring back then.

15. Neighbours 6.30pm - 954,000
19. Good News Week 8.30pm - 865,000
23. Friends (r) 7pm - 776,000
24. America's Next Top Model 7.30pm - 756,000
25. The Simpsons (r) 6pm - 752,000
29. Burn Notice 9.30pm - 641,000

All in all when Neighbours is your top rating show - you're in trouble and that's how ten was - 1 week after Big Brother wrapped for the final time, Ten had a game show (Taken Out) not ready for launch so filled the gap with reruns of Friends.

Whatever else you think about Taken Out, having that rerun break gave whatever remaining 7pm viewers ten had an opportunity to check out the competition, when Ten doesn't have a strong 7pm show - their whole schedule suffers - you only need to look back at the early posts on this very site to see just how bad they were going!

Which brings us to last night, the big question is, will the 7pm Project be a good lead-in for Ten's primetime or will it be Taken Out?

Well for the first night, so far so good, a live pastiche of news and panel style commentary with the odd live cross thrown in, it had a good debut averaging 1.2 million (with an increase in the second half - always a good sign) They also pulled a formidable 41.3% of the 18-49 age demographic.

Ten programmer David Mott has indicated to TV Tonight that the show would live or die by it's demos so that's a good start.

Following at 7.30 was the final episode of The Recruits - one of ten's best factual launches in recent years, next week they're replaced by a new season of Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? That show did some real heavy lifting for Ten on Thursdays last year - as long at the 7pm project holds up as a lead-in they should post some good numbers.

Post 8.30 is a bit hard to judge - GNW had the night off with a rerun posting figures more akin to 2008 and Supernatural dropped drastically as a result. There are apparently only two eps of Supernatural left this season and it's a good bet that new ones won't return until summer (where they've got some clear air) so whatever Ten puts at 9.30 is going to be crucial for them in the weeks ahead - with their post 8.30 falling apart they dropped to 3rd place and a 21 share for the night, that's passable but there's no killer app at 9.30 like last year's Andrew Denton which is holding everything else back - so theres's no reason they can't fill this slot with something hot that brings in the crowds.