Million Dollar Bogey

It’s an ironic twist that certain events have conspired to make me miss yesterday’s deadline forcing me to post two days worth of results on the one entry.

The reason is posting them together allows me to outlay a huge contrast in the fortunes of channel ten and channel seven and their dealings with production company Working Dog.

Working Dog productions is the boutique television company behind TV shows such as The Panel, The Hollowmen and Thank God You’re Here.

Thank God You’re Here was a megahit for channel ten, over the course of two years (2006-2007) the show was a top ten mainstay with in excess of two million viewers on several occasions.

After spending a year away from the screen the show’s producers late last year moved their skein to the Seven sked for an undisclosed sum which has been speculated to be up to one million dollars per episode.

At the time this was seen as yet another nail in the coffin at channel ten, the perennial third-place network was well on it’s way to coming fourth in 2008 with it’s major 7pm franchise Big Brother having failed resulting in the collapse of their Prime Time schedule.

For the last 13 weeks of the 2008 season it was rare for Ten to have more than four shows post more than 1 million viewers.

While one could look at the Working Dog decision as having the appearance of rats fleeing a sinking ship and on the other hand representing incredible business nous with the company parlaying a show nurtured by a rival broadcaster into a multi-million dollar payday, Thank God You’re Here producer Tom Gleisner sought to dampen the angry internet chatter by famously claiming that the move to Seven was about exposing the show to a wider audience.

Now 2008 rolls around and ten feels like they’ve got their mojo back, they were always going to have a respectable first quarter with The Biggest Loser a popular 7pm switch-on for the net, but it has been the performance of their Big Brother replacement, the cooking competish Masterchef, which has caught everyone by surprise.

Then there’s the case of Talkin’ ‘Bout Your Generation, an amiable nostalgia themed quiz show hosted by the normally avant guarde Shaun Micallef taking a rare paddle down the mainstream. It’s likely that with Thank God still on their roster, Ten wouldn’t have taken a chance on this show which was reportedly a spurr of the moment programming decision (producer Granada wasn’t even looking to pitch the show to Ten execs) but the gamble has paid off richly for the net giving them a stranglehold over Tuesday nights.

As for Thank God You’re Here. The show has performed well, but it has been repeatedly dogged in it’s Wednesday timeslot by Masterchef.

Masterchef’s second half hour on Wednesday has been butting up against the 4th season show dragging it’s ratings down significantly in the first half, last night was the first time Masterchef took on Thank God for the whole 7.30-8.30 hour and the result was an emphatic win to ten.

If the yet to be seen 7pm project is a success then Ten have indicated that skeins like Biggest Loser and Masterchef will be 7.30 starters next year, making prospects for a next season a lot bleaker for the Working Dog people

Payback’s a bitch I guess…


Tuesday 16 June 2009

Going Up
Masterchef up by 8.11%
The Bold and the Beautiful up by 7.24%
Today Tonight up by 6.96%
Around the World in 80 Gardens up by 6.83%
Ten News at Five up by 6.22%

Going Down
A Current Affair down 17.64% week on week
HomeMADE (7.30pm) down 14.93%
Artscape down 13.49% on Jennifer Byrne Presents
Two and a Half Men (8.30pm down 13.42%/7pm down 12.04%/9pm down 10.01%)
Mumbai Calling down 11.06%



Wednesday 17 June 2009

Going Up
American Dad up 103.54% over Prison Break
Masterchef up 71.49% over All New Simpsons
Masterchef up 24.78% over itself week on week
SVU New Episode up 16.36%
The Morning Show up 13.84%
SVU 9.30pm rebroadcast up 10.52%
Sunrise up 10.16%

Going Down
Cold Case down 28.37% on The Mentalist down 20.10% on itself week on week
Prison Break down 26.11% week on week
RPA down 25.31%
The Cook and the Chef down 18.82%
The New Inventors down 17.76%
Tracey Ullman’s State of the Union down 16.81%
Thank God You’re Here down 15.67%
7.30 Report down 11.36%
Two and a Half Men rebroadcast down 10.35%
Spicks and Specks down 10.11%

Masterchef paying dividends

Tuesday 5 May 2009

It may be too early to call it, but I think we can assume that Masterchef is starting to pay Ten dividends.

Last year viewers were actively tuning out from Ten with the bloated corpse of Big Brother stinking up the place, once all the viewers had gone, even burying Big Brother wasn’t enough to entice viewers back, people needed a reason.

Of course, that reason was The Biggest Loser, a reality contest that still has life left in it and gave viewers a reason to switch on Ten and stick around, but these reality shows only last a certain number of weeks so whatever was coming to replace Loser had to not suck.

So far Masterchef is doing the job, holding its ground in a competitive 7pm timeslot and even getting a bit of watercooler buzz (someone yesterday told me they watched, and this morning I got a text from someone else asking me to identify the theme song, the joke’s on them cuz I haven’t watched a complete episode!)

The payoff for ten is not so much the 7pm performance but the stability of their Prime Time schedule, witness a good launch for Recruits on Monday and a great launch last night for the new quiz/game/panel show thing Talkin ‘Bout Your Generation. It has to be one of the best starts ever for a Shaun Micallef project, the lawyer turned comedian was always the most original and funny in the Full Frontal cast and his shows The Micallef Pogram and Newstopia are among the funniest Australian Television of the last ten years, it’s nice to see the man have some success.

This success was all the more extraordinary given the performance of a doco on Seven about a Lion (???!?) there was about 5.1 million viewers watching free to air at 7.30 last night – an excellent result for the industry.

Then again, what the hell happened at 9.30, putting aside that the universally panned Kitchen Nightmares did better in Melbourne than an Underbelly (season 1) rerun did in Sydney (surely Gordon Ramsay’s Full Throttle F***fest would be a better fit with the mind in the gutter antics of Sheen and Cryer, but I digress.

The bigger problem at 9.30 was the spectacular fall of Ten Years Younger in Ten Days! The metaphorical arse has fallen out of this makeover show. Debut attracted 1,348,000. Second Week 1,226,000. This Week down to 990,000 that’s 358,000 viewers (26%) gone in the space of two weeks, has to be the most rapid haemorrhage since Aussie Ladette to Lady.

Big Week

Sunday 26 April 2009
Every April for the past several years Ten has a really big week, and this is the one, that’s when the finale of the Biggest Loser meets the premiere of Big Brother.

This year of course the scenario is a little different, Big Brother is no more, the show a victim of a myriad of bad decisions in the final season coupled with the standard viewer decline.

The Biggest Loser has surged in recent weeks and pulled in a very good result up 293,000 viewers week on week and 313,000 ahead of its nearest competition.

So You Think You Can Dance, by contrast, has limped along at times this year and although week on week it improved 281,000 viewers it struggled to hold sway against 60 Minutes and Seven’s The Force which has slotted into Sunday nights nicely.

Last Year the finale of Dance scored 1.8 million viewers, this year there were 416,000 less watching with an almost uniform decline in every capital.

What the show seemed to lack this season was buzz, if anything Biggest Loser had more press going in thanks to the behind the scenes antics of Ajay Rochester and Shannan Ponton whereas the dancing comp has been buzz-free since its return.

I’m not sure how ten can liven things up next year – some are suggesting a later start to the season, others are suggesting a new night.

Season three seems to be the point where ten starts mucking around with the format of these shows, for Big Brother season 3 saw the two-houses gimmick, Idol had change thrust upon it thanks to a Dicko defection, so the precedent is there, but also in both those cases a change in the format was followed by an audience decline.

A quick note that The Evidence seems to be doing well for Nine in the 10.30 hour and Bones actually beat CSI last night!! Perhaps people really were tuning in to see Grissom!

Remember to watch this space tomorrow, it’s gonna be a big night, the premiere of Masterchef, the finale of The Biggest Loser – up against, of all things, Underbelly, also the premiere of Eleventh Hour and Four Corners has a special on the recent Vic Bushfires which should see a good result for them.

Fourth & Down

Thursday 23 April 2009

The Footy Show really did well last night in Melbourne netting an average of 413,000 viewers over an almost 2 hour span becoming Melbourne’s second most watched show of the night behind Today Tonight.

As The Biggest Loser races toward the finish line Home & Away continued to flounder, it has placed third or lower on every night this week aside from Tuesday (a night which Seven dominates) that’s a poor showing for the long running soap.

Home & Away has proven itself durable, but also vulnerable, especially to Ten 7pm flights of fancy. In the early part of this decade it was Big Brother which gave Home & Away very real problems at 7pm, with only Nine’s lacklustre 7pm performance for comfort.

These days Nine is resurgent with reruns of a sitcom which still has 2 more years guaranteed (and could conceivably run for another 4 years on it’s current form) and Ten is about to launch Masterchef, how Home & Away winds up for the year will depend a lot on how audiences take to Ten’s new reality play.

Seven continues to swing for the fences on Thursdays making it their 3rd night playing for 16-39 year olds behind Monday and now Wednesday, the return of Heroes did alright but I wonder how long it will last before getting the Lost & 24 treatment?

Blame Big Brother - Monday 15 December 2008

You know sometimes networks make weird decisions, the last few weeks channel ten has been in a state of panic worse than a Wall Street broker with all his money tied up with Lehman Bros.

Whatever they try on Mondays it isn’t working.

In the 90s US network CBS had a great slogan “If its Mondays – It must be CBS” well it certainly isn’t Ten. Big Brother has effectively their Monday Nights in 2008.

If we look at the early part of the year Ten were riding high on Mondays with So You Think You Can Dance and Good News Week, this pair of shows were posting healthy figures throughout.

When Dance came to an end in stepped 7 year veteran Big Brother. Big Brother has always been a force on Mondays – the show killed Nine’s Monday comedy hour after Friends departed with the pithy and often exciting Nomination shows both entertaining fans and frustrating others with their constant overruns screwing with their TV viewing.

In 2008 Ten changed the game and came unstuck. In an effort to revamp BB they ditched the traditional Nomination-Elimination structure of the show – for this season viewers would ring to protect their favourites and the three with the lowest votes were up for eviction with the housemates having the final say.

On paper it looks like a refreshing change to the old formula which often proved frustrating for followers of the show when nomination was in the hands of the housemates.

But in practice it removed that vital Monday Nominations a great opportunity to get into the housemates heads and see how they tick, there was also some real suspense involved to see who would be up that week and the previous night’s evictee was invited along for special comments.

In 2008 this was dropped and instead the Daily Show at 7pm was extended to an hour with a new import ‘How to look good naked’ filling out the hour.

It was a ratings disaster and the absence of Nominations was, I believe, one of the factors behind Big Brother’s rapid decline in 2008.

While BB and Carson Kressley were driving viewers away from the resilient Good News Week, the 9.30 show, Big Brother Big Mouth with proven showkiller Tony Squires gave whoever was left at that time a good excuse to try another network.

Thanks to this awful show a lot of people developed new TV habits on a Monday night. One of those habits was Bones over on Seven which was last night the top prime time show!

With Big Brother out of the way Idol came back and after a brief surge of interest for the auditions wrestled with a new hourlong verdict show that dragged on and on bleeding viewers along the way, Good News Week did well enough to keep it’s head above water at 8.30 especially in the face of competing real news over on the ABC with a resurgent 4 Corners.

At 9.30 Ten started playing dangerous games with a low-rated (US Cable) actioner with a very vocal fan base – Burn Notice couldn’t resuscitate Ten’s woeful 9.30 hour, nor could Supernatural a onetime megahit for ten scrounging for 1/3 of its original fanbase despite being fast tracked.

The year ended with Ten trialling the spin-off of 90210 (CW) first at 8.30 then eventually at 7.30. When an 8.30 debuts with less than 700,000 viewers you know the jig is up, Ten had managed to destroy Monday nights.

Now it’s summer and already there’s been 2 schedule changes (one that never made it to air!), first was pulling the planned screening of failed US drama Swingtown replacing it with another failed US drama The Ex List – after two weeks at 9.30 The Ex List was pulled new drama Army Wives moved to it’s slot and a second hour of Law & Order CI added, all the while ignoring the elephant in the room…

Carson Kressley is watchable and after the success of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (well for about a year anyway) Ten could certainly expect a turnout for his new show. Indeed in it’s debut the show did fire pulling 1,227,000 viewers but the numbers quickly fell away after the initial look.

Ten left their line up in place for two weeks, in week one it was clear that the Naked show was struggling against formidable competition at 7.30 but Army Wives lifted at 8.30

The Second week was worse – although Naked grew, Wives dropped from it’s lead in, a disastrous result, although it was the final night for The Howard Years which was significant summer competition. The Ex list fell into no-mans land under 500k – once that happens the plug is pulled.

Which leaves us with last night – Law & Order was brought in to shore up 8.30 – it didn’t do much of a job, perhaps the promotion was insufficient, perhaps people feel they’ve had enough law and enough order without adding a third night, perhaps it’s the third cop show in the timeslot creating a drain on the audience. Whatever the case it didn’t help much and Army Wives moving to 9.30 was a failure itself falling into the under 500k dead zone – will we see it next week?

My advice to Ten, Give Carson the flick and put a nice long movie on, or show a test pattern – can’t do much worse!