Waiting out the summer - Thursday 23 - Saturday 25 January 2009

That's a bit what it's like at the moment, waiting for something exciting to happen on TV, being assaulted left right and centre by Tennis and Cricket (and Beach Cricket for good measure).

Pay TV continues to provide real gems among the endless reruns of Judge Judy and Law & Order, like tonight Bio has a Final 24 special on the death of Tupac Shakur (Bio 8.30pm), TV1 has the next installment of TVLAND Moguls - Aaron Spelling (TV1 9.30), E! has the funniest show on TV - The Soup (E! 7.00) and SciFi is playing 'E.T. The Extra Terrestrial' (10.30pm)

But FTA is stuck in a rut, the promos are getting nicer as they promise all sorts of great new shows (or shows we saw last year due to fast tracking) but who is even watching to see these promotions.

Well here's the deal - if you need to promote your Prime Time lineup - sport helps.

Obviously due to the broad appeal and multi media coverage - a big sporting event can draw the spectators to the television regardless of lead in or a channel's reputation, and every summer for years has devolved into a tussle for sporting supremacy between Seven and Nine for top dog while Ten brings up the rear of the pack.

Nine's Cricket is always a massive draw but in recent years Seven has managed to parlay their 2 week tennis fiesta into a major promotional drive for their new season.

So putting those two aside for a moment - how is Ten doing?

Well on Thursdays - really well, Ten's Law & Order night has been dominant over all comers this summer and although bettered by the Tennis on Thursday it was still strong enough to leave Nine's lineup in the dust. This bodes well for the return of SVU in two weeks and the premiere of a big new skein Life on Mars.


Add to that a new wrinkle this week in that finally Don't Forget The Lyrics (a summer staple for the net) has lifted it performance above 800,000 for the first time - not dominant, but much better than normal - perhaps picking up a few stray Ugly Betty viewers.

On Fridays though the picture flips - although The Simpsons at 7.30 typically does well (though not so much this week with sport soaking up much of it's audience) Law & Order (the original in new eps no less) has been struggling all summer.


It has been a brave decision to put a long running (and generally well rating) cop series on Friday nights (a night bereft of solid entertainment for years) I have my fingers crossed that the addition of Paranormal/Cop Show hybrid Medium will be enough to bring non sport watchers to the tube on Fridays because the payoff from a regular series versus one shot movies is much greater for the network which can guarantee an aud for advertisers (with movies no such guarantee can exist)

Saturday was a bizarre surprise, Tennis, of course, was the dominant game in town, but a movie which has been rerun so many times that every teenager in the country has seen it and memorised it (Billy Madison) pulled an impressive aud versus the more family friendly lineup on Nine (Funniest Vids/Superman III), afterward another rerun movie - The Jackal continued the decent numbers despite a long history of adult movies airing on this night.


As far as I can figure the family aud was watching the Tennis leaving barely anyone left to see Nine's family lineup, that leaves anyone not interested in sport watching the Bruce Willis movie and perhaps the teens watching the ultimate guilty pleasure film before they go out. Whatever, in a few weeks it won't matter much - ten will have the Saturday sport, Nine will have the family movies and Seven will pick over the oldies and the natural order will once again be restored!

Ten's Answer = More Tyra - Sunday 4 January 2009

Hey everyone

Even though the networks are still asleep at the wheel it’s time to get back into the fray and bring forth some ratings analysis – the first for this bright shiny new year and what can we see…

Ah yes – people like Cricket! Very good, good stuff people. After some middling ratings for the earlier test outings, Cricket seemed to get it’s game on yesterday with a gargantuan daytime audience of 1.1 million, even The Cricket Show a half hour time filler (they used to play sitcom reruns in that lunch break when I was a kid!) did spectacular business. All of this crickety goodness help Nine News to the No. 1 spot on the ladder last night

Seven News was still impressive though – given it’s lead in was the embarrassingly titled “Does My Bum Look Big?”

Seven got another big shot in with their reality shows, but the Rich List lost 100,000 viewers from lead in Hot Property and while it didn’t do badly (channel ten would kill for that number) – it was not a very confident performance from Seven’s perspective.

Channel Ten is in distress – I’m not sure how they’re keeping the lights on over there this summer because there’s an awful lot of PSA’s taking up commercial breaks on that channel right now which is a sad situation.

Don’t Forget The Lyrics seems to be a show that’s very dependant on it’s lead in, ie: you’re not going to seek this show out, it’s not appointment television the way that you will make a point to catch The Big Bang Theory, rather it’s the kind of show that you’ll watch if its on when you’re watching.

This is bad news if your lead in is the centre of the known universe: Tyra Banks. Tyra’s modelling quest now has less viewers on free to air than it does on Cable (the series’ weekly reach on Foxtel is 831,000 viewers) So what does ten decide to do? Axe the series you say? No – they’re adding another hour! This time 7.30 Mondays to replace the failed How to Look Naked.

Whilst I’m happy they’ve taken out that particular low rater – why replace it with another one. Of course this time tomorrow I could be eating my words and Model could be a big hit back on Mondays – but don’t hold your breath…

Cricket = Nine's Friend - Sunday 30 November 2008

Nine can be pleased with the first night of summer – the lead-in from cricket gave the early part of their night a nice lift over their rivals.

20 to 01 again proved the timeslot king, that is until summer stalwart Hot Property bowed at 7pm giving Seven a boost and further embarrassing Jamie Durie who once again came up short.

I expect 20 to 01 to lift next week as Thank God You’re Here bows out and comedy watchers are left with one remaining option, notwithstanding the unintentional comedy of Tyra Banks’ inflated ego.

Given the paltry lead-in you would think that Don’t Forget the Lyrics did alright to get to 830,000 but you’d be wrong, out of all the 7.30 shows on commercial nets Ten actually had the least increase with only 87,000 added, whilst Seven added 131,000 and Two and Half Men drew an extra 166,000 to the set.

I remember a long time ago when Nine had a mega hit sitcom in the form of Friends – they tried every conceivable show behind it – Caroline in the City, Veronica’s Closet (Good first season then stupidly re-tooled), Jesse (Boring show, good theme song), Spin City (underrated sitcom one of Nine’s best), Malcolm in the Middle (strong start then disappeared!?) and Two and a Half Men.

Now a and the ones that did then couldn’t perform well on their own. This year now that Two and a Half Men is a hit, Nine is trying to get a second, they tried Til Death and succeeded in growing it’s audience, except that the show looks to be on life support in the US and is therefore perhaps not a long term prospect so they’re giving another tryout to Chuck Lorre’s other show – The Big Bang Theory and so far, so good – if it can keep this sort of retention over summer then Nine has another long term prospect on their hands as it is also one of CBS’ best sitcom performers in the states, always improving on it’s 8pm lead-in How I Met Your Mother.

The last Monday sitcom CBS had which pulled better 8.30 ratings than it’s 8pm lead-in was Everybody Loves Raymond which in it’s second season was outrating it’s 8pm lead-in Cosby, it was moved to 9pm the following year where it stayed for the remainder of it’s run as the tentpole show for CBS on Mondays.

Finally, Ten seems to have been vindicated by scheduling School of Rock for the 800th time this season, I suppose in the eternal network game of rock/paper/scissors improbable comedy movie beats out fact based drama.