Two Words

I have two words
Swamp. People.

I'm kicking myself that I missed it.

How do I know about this show - only through The Soup, that alone makes it must watch television.

Meanwhile what has happened to How I Met Your Mother.

I don't think that Seven has ever tolerated a 7.30 audience under 500,000 viewers - ever. Something else will be there next week.

Boys retreat to digital

You know how I can tell that Seven has the female audience stitched up on Sundays? Look at the digital channels, male skewing shows dominated with 7mate's entire night, Big Bang, Top Gear all peaking over 300,000 viewers.

First Blood (aka Rambo) absolutely dominated digital on the night, how many women would be watching that? Instead they were all glued to Downtown Abbey on channel 7.

By contrast any digital channel going specifically after women last night bombed. 7TWO would do better running a test pattern on Sundays rather than persisting with Royal Upstairs Downstairs. Meanwhile GEM's The Reader bombed despite being the most recent movie to screen last night!

Think Small

Well there's no stopping Seven - the week's top shows read like a list of Last Week's top shows...

Dancing with the Stars, Downtown Abbey, Australia's Got Talent, Masterchef, Winners & Losers, Amazing Race and Glee.

So lets look instead at Digital TV and what's working and what's struggling.

Sunday:

Lots of movies on this night so digital dominance is never assured, if you're after a mature drama then GEM is your option, more brash blockbuster fare lives on GO!, 7mate and Eleven.

The abject failure of the night is Royal Upstairs Downstairs on 7TWO, surprising and yet not, because most of the potential audience for this crap would be watching Dancing with the Stars in prep for Downtown Abbey. A case of Seven cannibalising its own lineup.


Monday:


GO! back when it started was something fresh and exciting, now it's more or less cheap and nasty. The number of original series on the channel has nosedived and those that are left are victims of wildly inconsistent scheduling.

GO! is now a dumping ground for channel nine reruns, specifically Top Gear and the Big Bag Theory, propped up with Movie reruns (some quite good) and timeshifted stuff from the main channel (like Come Fly with Me in this particular night).

What happened to the GO! that drew me away from cable with TMZ, Seinfeld and a dozen shows aimed away from the mainstream?

At the first sign of competition these things were junked in favour of Top Gear reruns.

Abject failure is oddly enough on GO! which has hollowed out it's sked so much that any sort of regularity or consistency is roundly ignored by viewers - hence the poor performance of the Funniest Home Vids daily show (basically FHV without the crap about competitions or corporate sponsors)


Tuesday:


Seven's schedule on this night is still britcoms but is a slightly different shape than Autumn's lineup giving a bit of breathing room to 11 which has picked markedly this week.

Even The Office on a lowly 111K is posting its best result all season, but Ten's attempt to go retro and replace Raising Hope with Frasier bombed losing over 20,000 from its leading and knocking Nurse Jackie (which is now airing 1 day after its US broadcast) and Californication out of contention.

Special Mention has to go to BIG on GEM, a reality show (also on Nine - there's that timeshifting at work again) evidently so boring that nobody can be bothered to even make a wikipedia page about it, and it charted so low that it didn't even make the digital top 100 - surely a sign that your show is a waste of everybody's time.


Wednesday


You know if I ever bothered to watch GEM - I think I would grow to hate myself, If GO! has turned into a clearing house for hits you've seen before, GEM has turned into a 24/7 Fly on the Wall channel, and the flies are all over this one - with titles like "The World's Hairiest Person and Me", "Embarrassing Teen Bodies" and "Brothers & Sisters In Love" if there's such a thing as hell, this is surely the only channel they can get there - well, this and C31.

I have to give a shout out to Jersey Shore over on Seven Mate - its one of the biggest TV phenomena in the US to come down the cable in some years, by the same channel (MTV) that gave the world The Osbornes, a show that has had so much impact in the US has fizzled out here - yet the reasons are obvious, anyone who wants to have seen it - has seen it.

MTV on Foxtel plays this show constantly, everyone else would've torrented the thing two years ago, (which is an appalling wait for Australians in this day and age)


Thursday


On Thursday's everyone gets a turn, the older skew on the night seems to throw up a situation with lots of shows scoring decent numbers and nothing really failing (Except for Heli-Loggers whose potential aud probably went to bed at 9.30 - quick Seven better slot in another rerun of Family Guy)

Still being served

Tuesday 25 January 2011

Tuesday night mostly belonged to Seven which at 8pm commanded some 1.3 million viewers across it's 3 channels.



Even though individually after 7pm no show pulled over 800,000 viewers there was still about 4 million metro people overall watching in the 7.30 hour, it just that they're now split over 15 channels rather than 5 like in the old days!

The netlets too are starting to have breakout performers, for a long time on GO! The Big Bang Theory has been the star performer on the network, whereas Family Guy and American Dad! are routinely the best on ground for 7mate. Eleven also has early breakout hits with The Simpsons and Neighbours but 7TWO's best of British mantra is paying dividends in total viewers, look t the ratings for Are You Being Served? A britcom from the 70s (and 80's - man alive it ran long enough!) that even had a sucessful repeat run on Ten back in 1992/93 has been ressurected on 7TWO with stunning results - proving the audience for these old shows is still around

Outta Control

Sunday, 23 January 2011

I'm back folks!

I was never really gone, but I've had a busy year between welcoming a fantastic new member to my family, dealing with an increasingly hectic day-job and rediscovering my passion for Video Games which kept me away from the television for a good part of 2010.

What little TV I did watch was mostly via Foxtel so I lost touch with the world of Free to Air (FTA). But recently I'd begun to notice that FTA has done some catching up in the past year.

Two new channels (7mate and GEM) virtually sprang up out of nowhere and while there's a certain irony in 80's 4:3 reruns and Lifetime movies taking up valuable HD bandwidth - they still add to the variety and the main selling point of digital television.

Then we had ABC News 24, Launched in time for the snap election earlier this year - again taking up valuable High Definition real estate in a weird attempt to recover lost ground from Sky News which in 2010 had come into it's own with the outstanding Agenda and Paul Murray programs.

Finally this month we've seen the launch of 11, using the number (whoever at Ten got No's one and eleven reserved is a legend, far better than 72 or 23!) gives a sense of importance and more importantly the netlet's schedule is a huge throwback to the way Ten was back in the 90s, before the dark times, before Big Brother.

Back when I was still doing this blog on a regular basis I was covering the 3 commercial nets and the ABC, now look at it!



I've excluded SBS, the ABC netlets and OneHD (because it's a failure in my eyes) but even then - there's 9 channels - the colour scheme is getting a little crowded - so I'll appreciate any suggestions on how to present the chart going forward.

But here's the first new one anyway - the most striking thing about it is the number of shows under a million, almost everything. Sure it's still summer - but I suspect in the future anything above 800,000 viewers will be considered a rousing success!