3 night weekend

Thursday, 10 February 2011

Well that's just appalling, Thursday is clearly STILL the day where the younger audience deserts the TV in favour of the box office and (in some states) late night shopping.

It has been like this for years, but multichannelling and audience erosion from Foxtel, PVRs, Consoles and the Internet have made it look even worse in recent times.

Nothing after 6.30 even scraped a million viewers.



Looking at the shows themselves, Seven seems to be pitching for younger viewers with How I Met Your Mother and Grey's Anatomy and by an large they're succeeding with those two shows taking the top slots for 18-49 and 16-39. Nine and Ten appear to be tussling over the older viewers with their crime procedurals but there's a bigger similarity between the nets

Save for The Good Wife and RBT, all of these shows are incredibly long in the tooth

Lets look at the stats

The Biggest Loser: 6th Season
How I Met Your Mother: 6th Season
Desperate Housewives: 7th Season
Grey's Anatomy: 7th Season
CSI: 11th Season
Law & Order SVU: 12th Season
Getaway: 20th Season

See a pattern - Thursday's are the TV God's Waiting Room. Shows that for whatever reason are profitible enough to keep going yet no longer the kind of water cooler cool that sustains shows that typically air Sunday - Wednesday

Even digital checks out on a Thursday - and though I'm personally happy to see TNG and The Golden Girls back in prime time, it does point to a night that Free to Air television has largely given up on.

I've been saying for years that Thursday is the new Friday night, but this schedule confirms it. Welcome to the weekend!

From Old and Bloated to Trim and Teriffic

Thursday, 3 February 2011

The Biggest Loser is just going from strength to strength, 1.3 million viewers is outstanding for a show that last year looked shell shocked from being pushed to 7.30 to make room for the 7pm project.



A year ago Loser was struggling to break 900,000 viewers per outing. This year they've made the show leaner with 4 1 hour installments a week helping to shore up Ten's typically weaker back half of the week with older demographics.

Seven looks like it is using the night to play the demographic game putting the younger skewing Mother and Greys skeins as well as Desperate Housewives which for me is in that category: "Is that still on??"

Similarly why are the CSI shows still going? Surely they're played out by now. Nine skews old with these dramas and Getaway - the show that's so old it's forgotten half of it's length - ready to be picked up by RBT - a show with a premise that's simultaneously stupid and yet so brilliant you wonder why nobody thought of it before!

Nice to see Stargate and Star Trek the Next Generation doing well in their slots on Eleven - Australian TV needs all the sci-fi it can get.

Outside the primetime grid there's a lot of blog chatter about the performance of Ten's new newshour - 6pm and 6.30 News - which has dropped week on week from the mid 400's to the mid 300's - its way to early to call these shows either a failure or success, my sincere hope is Ten will succeed with this venture - their decision to deal themselves into the 6pm hour is the biggest shakeup that the TV schedule has had - and in the long run it will put their prime time schedule on an even footing.

Farmer Wants a Wife, City Homicide wants a Miracle

Well - the combo of Knocked Up in the northern states and Desperate Housewives' season finale in the southern states was a winner for Seven, as was Brothers and Sisters and a special about the amazing landing of a commercial airliner on New York's Hudson River earlier in the year.

The schism in Seven's schedule was caused by a monday night AFL match a while back, next week they return City Homicide - back on Monday nights after a failed venture onto Sundays. I wonder whether the show will hit it highs of last year (flying around the 1.8 million mark at one stage) or just maintain a firm 1.2 million aud.

Farmer Wants a Wife also returned, also to a different timeslot (it was on Wednesdays 7.30 earlier in the year - consistency is not a buzzword at either of the private equity nets) to a decent rating but was incredibly bettered by The Big Bang Theory which was up after a disastrous week last week where people flocked to Australian Story instead (it may be that when OzTam start measuring Time Shifting - Big Bang will probably be one of the big benefactors)

Geeks vs Freak

If there is a show I feel sorry for right about now it's The Big Bang Theory. On it's third tryout on Nine making a concerted effort to find another sitcom to spin off of the Harper Bros the show has run smack bang into two solid weeks of Michael Jackson specials on Seven.

Last night Seven reaired the second hour of the Michael Jackson 30th Anniversary concert from 2001 (30th anniversary of his solo career), it came around the time of Invincible, an album which remains underappreciated because by the time of it's release Jackson's bizarre personal life had well and truly overshadowed whatever he was doing music-wise.

Desperate Housewives did even better for Seven booking 1,253,000 an increase over last week.

Supernatural was down 11%, the only thing letting down ten on an otherwise stellar night which saw Neighbours over 900,000 (a rare feat for the ancient soapie) and Masterchef up by 8% week on week heading for the finale.

Nine, Ten up, Seven, Two down - Monday 30 March 2009

A very good Monday for Nine and Ten with both channels increasing their average aud in Prime Time while Seven and the ABC fell backwards week on week.

Save for How I Met Your Mother, the rest of Seven’s primetime took a hit with Scrubs losing 26k, Desperate Housewives losing 85k and Boston Legal shedding 21k week on week.

None of those losses looked that bad when put next to the ABC with Australian Story, Four Corners and The Cut all shedding in excess of 100,000 viewers from last week.

Nine’s biggest improvers were Customs (up by 108,000 viewers) and Crime Investigation Australia (up 99,000 viewers), Underbelly went up after several weeks of decline clawing back 52,000 viewers

The biggest gains however were at Ten with their special broadcast of stand up comedy from Melbourne (where most of the viewer increase was) netting an impressive 1.1 million and pushing the late news into the top 30.

Spac Filler of the week - Monday 23 March 2009

The ABC had a big week on week improvement with The 7.30 Report booking over 1 million viewers (which doesn’t happen often), Australian Story recording what must be it’s biggest aud so far this year with a reportedly thought provoking case examining the aftermath of euthanasia.

The spotlight on idiotic Judge Marcus Einfeld (a speeding ticket ffs!) gave a boost to Four Corners lifting it by 210,000 viewers, in turn struggling drama The Cut lifted by 72,000 viewers to something approaching a daytime audience.

Good News for Scrubs fans the show rose 36,000 viewers into respectable territory which should keep the wolves at bay, rising too was Desperate Houswives (by 24k) Seven seems to be digging in to keep viewers interested in the show, running weekend marathons, putting the episodes online, you name they’re doing it.

Meanwhile Underbelly dropped to its lowest aud ever with 100,000 less viewers than the previous week, that is still a good audience but it has been in decline for several weeks now.

Time to give out the spac-filler award, much like the putty you would use to repair holes in plaster walls, network programmers occasionally have to resort to cheap reruns to paper over holes in their schedule, occasionally these changes produce very good results like today’s award winner NCIS…

NCIS was moved to this timeslot 3 weeks back to sub for Serial Killer drama Dexter which had sunk to the unsustainable low number of 506,000 viewers, NCIS improved week on week by 151,000 viewers, building an additional 393,000 on Dexter’s last primetime figure to outrate it’s lead-in and Brothers and Sisters! Outstanding!

Auntie takes a beating - Monday 9 March 2009

Another Monday, another large body count and another channel nine victory.

Underbelly actually grew week on week by another 34,000 viewers while Desperate Housewives dropped by 39,000! Meanwhile timeslot also-ran Good News Week built an extra 44,000 people onto its base registering over the 800,000 mark and back out of danger, 4 corners was hit hard with 85,000 viewers tuning out week on week.

In fact the ABC has taken quite a pummelling on Monday nights in recent weeks – especially considering their relative strength last year, case in point is 9.30pm:

There were more people watching TV at 9.30 last night than were watching at the comparable hour last week, Brothers & Sisters was up 22,000 viewers, Crime Investigation Australia lifted a whopping 193,000 week on week (the night’s best improver) and a rerun of NCIS brought an additional 149,000 people who couldn’t be stuffed with Dexter the previous week, yet ABC’s 9.30 entry – The Cut actually lost 81,000 viewers week on week??? This is after losing 83,000 viewers the previous week – there’s not a lot of people left to lose here!

Now I haven’t seen it so I cannot judge whether it’s a turkey or not, but bleeding viewers at a regular rate is not exactly a vote of confidence.

In fact thinking about it – I don’t even know what its about, I’ve never seen a promo and I watch the ABC sometimes for 7.30 report and Lateline - perhaps the ABC’s lack of in-show breaks is hurting their ability to promote new shows, we’ve become so trained to hit the remote the moment a program finishes that we no longer stick around for the coming attractions.

I watch even less SBS but I can tell you more of what they have on just by virtue of promos during the programs. Sounds like a tricky problem for the ABC for the years to come.

Bad News Week - Monday 16 February 2009

Underbelly virtually held all of its gargantuan audience second week in. This is certainly shaping up to be high watermark in Australian television and channel Nine’s best chance at promoting their 2009 lineup, infact anyone with their TV tuned to Nine last night would have been inundated with promos for their struggling Wednesday lineup.

A decision which, a few weeks ago, I blasted as being sheer idiocy has actually worked out well for Nine (just a moment whilst I fetch a hat to eat) that decision being the axing of The Big Bang Theory replacing it with a hastily cobbled together factual series Customs, err sorry Vince Colosimo: Customs! I wish Nine had persisted with Big Bang in this slot because it strikes me that this Customs show is attracting a lot of folks waiting around for the next program, but anyway – despite the short-term thinking the move is still a great success.

Also a success is the Australian Ladette to Lady – question is can they carry that across to Tuesday nights and how long does the series even go for – the opening scenes suggested that the course at Eggleston Hall ran for four weeks – that doesn’t seem like a very long series to me.

Desperate Housewives lifted a little last night and incredibly Brothers & Sisters retained 94% of its audience which must be some kind of record. I fully expect to see 11 more weeks of Friday/Saturday encores for these two shows to keep the viewers up to speed while they flirt with the crims over of Nine.

Speaking of Encores, the remaining 500,000 people who haven’t seen Dexter on DVD or Showcase were entertained I guess – but Ten is hurting badly on Monday night – even after what was a fairly solid start to the evening by Neighbours and So You Think You Can Dance.

Good News Week has dropped week on week by 61,000 viewers while Four Corners rose by 143,000. Indeed these two shows seem to be fighting over largely the same audience and seeing as the ABC ain’t gonna budge it might be wise for Ten to move GNW to 9.30 (there’s a lot of Ex – Enough Rope viewers looking for something to watch) and Dexter to 10.30.

Of course that leaves the 8.30 problem – given that the slot will be a loss for the next 10 weeks anyway, why not encore screenings or Out of the Blue!! (OK maybe that’s going too far!)

Rinse and Repeat - Friday 13 February 2009

Both Nine and Seven had sporting events on Friday night which managed to fracture the schedule across the country.

Seven was split down state lines with Sydney/Bris showing encore episodes and the southern states carrying AFL.

Nine was split by time zone due to their live cricket coverage - viewers in Bris, Perth and Adelaide were treated to an encore screening of Underbelly

I'm not even going to attempt to spot a trend in all that mess - except to say that a national sport (Cricket) easily outperformed a regional sport (AFL). The irony is that I'll bet you the rights to the AFL costed Seven way more than the cricket rights costed Nine.

Ten at least ran a consistent sked - and although they were again up against a mountain of sport - they seemed to do a good job of anyone not tuned into the cricket.

Welcome Back - Sunday & Monday 1-2 February 2009

The season has unofficially kicked off giving us a good opportunity to look at the early starters and see where the competition is going this year.

First you get the sport
If there was any doubt then Sunday night’s ratings at least proved Tennis’ ability to draw a huge crowd to the television. At 8.30pm Sunday an average of 4.5 million viewers was watching television in the 5 capitals, a phenomenal result this early in the year.

Cricket too was no slouch, but it’s fortunes seemed to depend on what was on Ten, whereas the Tennis steadily built throughout the night.

Then you get the reality
Ten’s two big reality franchises cranked up again and suddenly viewers discovered channel Ten again!

The Biggest Loser commenced it’s fourth season at 6.30pm Sunday with an hour long introduction to the various couples who will feature in this season, it also ended with the most ludicrous cliffhanger in the show’s 3 year history hanging on the edge of one of host Rochester’s incredibly drawn out sentences

At first glance it looks like a disappointment, the show came third in it’s timeslot, but consider a few caveats

– it was up against two popular sporting events
– it had the Herculean task of lifting from a 266,000 viewer lead-in

Not sure what Ten is going to do about Out of the Blue – it’s like an Albatross, the only reason Ten has bought it is to qualify for points on it’s Australian drama quota (you know – keep the rent seekers happy) but to do this they have to show it in Prime Time, but it is currently Prime Time poison. Not sure how they’re gonna solve this one.

So You Think You Can Dance also started last night for it’s second season premiere and posted a 153,000 viewer improvement on it’s lead in and second in the timeslot.

It took a hit on Monday losing 151,000 viewers night on night, but that may be due to increased competition.

Then you get the women…OK so Desperate Housewives might do alright this year though you’ve gotta hand it to Ten for doing their best to burn up their re-entry. The Devil Wears Prada just earned a spot on Ten’s movie wheel (yes that’s what I’m calling it) with a sound 1.4 million viewers, just shading the housewives and leaving Brothers and Sisters in the dust. Clearly men did not control the remote last night as the only testosterone on the night (T3) sunk without a trace.


Oh and the sitcoms
Last night also saw the launch of one the dumbest competitions ever – sitcom vs sitcom. You know this sort of thing isn’t new but generally the programmers have stuck comedies on different nights, now more than ever when good sitcoms are in short supply different timeslots makes more sense to maximise your ratings and the public thirst for laughs, but instead Seven has decided to pit their summertime star performer (How I met your mother) against it’s US stablemate (Two and a Half Men), the result is there for all to see – they didn’t even beat Big Bang Theory, and that should’ve been a walkover.

Well done Worner – how long before we can expect this good show in an 11.30 slot?

Finally hey – it’s Ten
Yeah uh – people watch channel Ten last night – like The Simpsons and Neighbours all posted increases. The Biggest Loser was down night on night – but still a stratospheric increase over Ten’s 7pm entires for the past 6 months. The result of this was that Ten won Monday with 28.4% share to Seven’s 28%, Nine which relaunched it’s look (it’s currently the nicest looking of all the nets) was in third on 20.7%. Ten also won in 18-49, 16-39 and 25-54 with Seven taking out the over 50’s

Primetime Preview: Mondays

7.30 – 8.30
How I Met Your Mother vs Two and a Half Men/The Big Bang Theory vs So You Think You Can Dance

Ouch – we have so few sitcoms on TV right now – why do the networks insist on pitting them against each other.

Part of me feels that after a successful summer at 7pm, How I Met Your Mother will have the chops to take on the Charlie Sheen laffer, but then I saw the promo for the first new episode next Monday – look how big Jake has gotten!!! The fact that puberty has finally hit that kid will have me and every other sitcom fan tuning in next Monday night

The hot tip…
Two and a Half Men in first place with So You Think You Can Dance in second, How I Met Your Mother in third and The Big Bang Theory bringing up the rear (it deserves to be a timeslot winner but it still hasn’t fully caught on yet)

I’m very interested to find out what Seven will schedule after How I Met Your Mother, or if they’ll be showing hourlong installments (which would burn through them awfully quickly)

8.30 – 9.30
Desperate Housewives vs Underbelly: A Tale of Two Cities vs Good News Week

So Nine really wants that Monday win and they’re going about it well too – Underbelly in 2008 was a megahit even without viewers in it’s home state – the new version should have a big turnout for the premiere – what happens after that depends a lot on the quality of the series and the intrigue of the storyline.

Desperate Housewives jumps forward in time by 5 years which sounds like a cool idea for a fifth season but it will struggle to garner attention against Nine’s local spectacular.

Finally Good News Week returns after a year of decent performances (but never setting the world on fire) given the competition this is Ten’s smartest move leaving the drama to others and offering a fun alternative/

The hot tip…
Underbelly, for 12 weeks anyway, then Housewives when it vacates.

9.30 – 10.30
Brothers & Sisters vs Aussie Ladette to Lady vs Dexter

At least you can say there’s something for everyone here, Brothers & Sisters which is a soap opera I guess should hold enough housewives viewers, the Underbelly audience may split up with those interested in violence heading over to Dexter which is a US premium cable serial about a police forensic/serial killer who only kills criminals (that’s one way to keep the prison population low), and those interesting in T&A moving on to Aussie Ladette to Lady. If ever there was a reality show that I didn’t expect a local version of – this was it!

The hot tip…
I’d like to think that the more conducive timeslot and better promotion would get Dexter over the line but something tells me that this local version of Ladette to Lady will be a minor hit, Nine have shown the nous to use the British instructors from that show which will help them immensley as their starched demeanour provides an excellent source of comedy against the louts that come through that finishing school!

All shows will benefit from the absence of Andrew Denton who retired his Enough Rope program late last year.

Sunday Night in America - 2 November 2008 (US)

Here's another look at the American Broadcast Network ratings, specifically looking at the viewer turnout in the 18-49 segment.

As you can see from the chart - the biggest turnout in younger viewers was for The Simpsons, for this year's Treehouse of Horror special. Also scoring well was NFL on both Fox & NBC and Desperate Housewives on ABC.

Typically (as we'll see with these charts) while CBS pulls the best overall figures it lingers behind with it's older skewing fare. It was always thus for the Tiffany Network, even back to the days when their Sunday Nights were 60 Minutes, Murder She Wrote and a Hallmark Movie, they go old and for it they are rewarded handsomely in total viewers, just not many of them under 50...