Back to Reality

Well day two for The Block is still good, but kept in check by the bafflingly popular Home & Away (seriously I don't know a single person who admits to watching this show!)

Meanwhile the appetite for NCIS has waned, there was a time when reruns of the procedural would draw in 1.1million viewers without breaking a sweat. Not anymore, now that people have options on digital TV, its getting harder to justify reruns in primetime on the major networks.

Cock Blocked by Nine

OK so the title has very little to do with the post in this instance - but Nine's revival of the Block as a strip has gotten off to a great start.

Elsewhere - Seven's coverage of Wimbeldon on 7TWO has delivered less spectacularly, and more worryingly their 9.30 show on the main channel (Air Crash Investigations) is dead in the water. When you're beaten by Rescue Special Ops you know you have failed.

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!

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.