Waving and drowning

Ten have all but given up on Wednesday nights.  They tried valiantly for a while with the cop drama Blue Bloods, that faltered so they wheeled out reruns of Modern Family a sitcom that in just over a year on the air feels like its been run to death.

Now they're slotting in Just 4 Laughs specials which is the equivalent of waving your white flag and surrendering the night.

Expect lots of super sized specials from Masterchef when it returns.  As well as a concerted promotional push behind whatever drama they throw behind it.

City Homicide is D.O.A.

Wednesday, 2 March 2011

If there's a story on Wednesdays its the slow agonising death of City Homicide over on Seven, that this once 8.30 show is now drawing less than half the audience of its first two seasons is a crying shame. I suspect its already been confirmed as the last season for the show - but even so that's kind of depressing.

Still its not as bad as Ten, holy mackeral all their shows sucked last night, Biggest Loser posted one of its lowest auds yet, Blue Bloods is surely on the way out and Lie to Me would probably be doing a lot better were it not for Blue Bloods.

I do notice that Eleven has dropped Bob's Burgers, but closer examination shows that the show took a week off in the US so maybe it'll be back, at any rate a second episode of Cleveland did better in its place!

It begins...

Wednesday 23, February 2011

A pretty depressed night all around I think. My Kitchen Rules, Criminal Minds and The Biggest Loser were the only things that went well last night. Channel Nine's Mike & Molly won't last much longer in this timeslot - especially given the show's either side are doing relatively well.

City Homicide is demonstrating why it was axed with less than half a million viewers, still that's better than Blue Bloods which has haemorraghed viewers weekly since its debut. Perhaps a Friday slot (like in the US) would be a better play for this drama.



Of course yesterday all the real action in TV wasn't on the screen or behind the camera but actually in the board room with the long running Grant Blackley being ousted as Channel Ten CEO, replaced by Lachlan Murdoch as acting CEO.

Its worth noting that although the catalyst for this move is undoubtably the faltering 6pm newshour, the bigger problem for Ten has been the miss-step that is One HD which is trying to attract an audience for sport which just isn't there - the sports audience has been a vocal minority for quite some time.

Also, whilst their strategy with 11 has actually been quite sound, they don't have the mainstream following on the main channel to actually back it up. What I'm trying to say it with 7 and 9 their main audience is adults 25-54 who like middle of the road fare, both GO! and 7mate perfectly complement their main channels by offering targeted 16-39 shows and GEM and 7TWO catch the older viewers uncatered to by the mainstream channels with their heady mix of reruns and Old Brittania.

11 meanwhile is going after mostly the same audience as Ten, Ten (to its credit) has tried to skew older, entrenching US procedurals at 8.30 on every night but there's only so many mainstream viewers to go around and they're increasingly going for first run Australian shows over and above imported hits.

Essentially Ten needs to figure out who it's main channel is aimed at and then somehow come up with a compelling offering for those folks.

One thing is for certain, it will be very interesting to see what happens with both Ten and One over the next year - I've heard many incredible suggestions from dedicated music and movie channels to turning one of the channels over to Packer/Murdoch owned Sky News Australia, I can't wait to see what they come up with.

A cyclone runs through it.

Wednesday, 2 February 2011

Last night primetime programming was suspended on Seven (and to a lesser extent Nine) for rolling coverage of Tropical Cyclone Yasi as it made its way through North Queensland.



Nine already had the Cricket commitment and Ten stuck to it's schedule (for the most part) and it paid off with an excellent debut for "Blue Bloods" the new Tom Selleck/Donnie Wahlberg police skein.

Today I've decided to only list the pecking order for 1st Second and Third and to largely leave the digital channels out of it because the digital figures are so close together and so reliant on demographics for advertising dollars that pecking order comparisons become meaningless.

Yes Heartbeat dominates whenever it's run, whilst 7mate's Sitcoms and The Simpsons do good work on Wednesdays, but they're all pandering to their own audiences and neither is very much in danger from the other.

But it's still interesting to see how much they're all getting. Indeed The Simpsons has taken a real beating on it's move to digital heaven, arguably the potential audience for everything goes down when you give people more choice - so the 200 thousand turning out for New Simpsons eps are the real die-hard fans, where as there's another tier who like the Simpsons but they'll catch it when its on and still another tier that watched it because it was the best thing on at the time, that third group no longer applies in the digital age - they have too many other choices.

For this reason I think when the analogue is totally switched off we will see the figures between the main channels and the digital channels even out a bit more as more people have the choice to watch something else.