Serious Trouble - Wednesday 5 November 2008

Memo to Nine, movies shown in midweek timeslots have not worked for years, and so it is with their latest Wednesday movie – Talledega Nights. It must be especially frustrating for Nine given that the lead in was the unstoppable Wednesday edition of Two and a Half Men, they must have thought some people would stick around for the comedy movie but clearly only 46% of their 8pm audience were interested in the prospect.

Even more damning is my memo to Ten, documentaries about Animals do not work – at least not on channel ten and here’s why

a) Animal or Nature docos appeal primarily to an older viewing audience
b) At any given time, channel Ten’s share of over 55 years old viewers rarely gets above 11% therefore it’s likely the intended audience would never have seen any promotion for the show.
c) The under 40 audience avoid these shows like the plague (hence the high numbers for two and a half men ever since Jamie Oliver showed up)

Ten is in serious trouble right now – there is no good way to spin it, their most popular program of the night was outside of Prime Time (the 5pm news), Neighbours posted a good result then the whole night fell in a heap, never lifting beyond it's 6.30 "high".

These are some of the worst numbers to come off the people meters for them since the introduction of people meters, ten need to use the summer for a complete reboot otherwise they will quickly see their share decline even further in the new year, just waiting for So You Think you can Dance and The Biggest Loser to pull them out of the hole is not going to be good enough – they need action ASAP.

Note to Ten: Quit while you’re ahead – Wednesday 29 October 2008

How Ten must pine for the glory days, back in 1995 their Wednesday Line up was a sight to behold, The Simpsons, The Nanny, The X Files, NYPD Blue, all big raters. They were the first network to really open up Wednesdays in 95 by scheduling shows (rather than movies) after 8.30pm. The other networks were quick to follow suit and all have owned the night at one point or another.

After Ten dominated early with The X Files, Seven brought Wednesdays under control with Blue Heelers, a mega popular country cop drama which used to command rating which would make any current TV number cruncher weep.

Nine took control of the night in the early part of this decade with CSI Miami and Without a Trace, until Ten wrested control again with the medical drama House.

Now the pendulum has swung back to Seven with the FBI Profiler procedural (vastly superior to that boring 90’s series “Profiler”) Criminal Minds dominating the night since the second half of this year.

Nine is making a play for a comeback – already in charge of the 7.30 hour with the sitcom Two and a Half Men their gamble of moving The Mentalist to Wednesday had a nice payoff last night with the show scoring over the million mark, while still third in the timeslot behind Seven and ABC – it’s a respectable third.

Less respectable is Ten’s entire night, rather than being assisted by it’s lead in Jamie’s Ministry of Food lost 149,000 viewers week on week, by contrast Two and a Half Men attracted an extra 128,000 people. Seven’s Crash Scene Investigators remained similar to CIU the previous week, although Medical Emergency remains more popular than either road accident doco.

House got a slight lift week on week, but then so did The Mentalist, the better news for Ten was with Life which lifted by 75,000 people week on week, most of those viewers came from CSI New York which dropped 73,000 people.

The low performance of everything at 9.30 highlights a problem. All three competing shows are by and large very similar shows, all involve cops, 2 of them are procedurals whereas Life is a procedural/serial and on a more basic level, all three are scripted adult dramas – there is only so much audience to go around for this stuff and if networks put it all up against each other then people have to choose.

Contrast this embarrassment of riches with a weekend lineup where virtually nothing is on and yet Monday thru Wednesday the networks are throwing shows at us but not really giving many alternatives.

Meanwhile Ten, if it continues with new episodes of House at 8.30 will have expended 10 or 11 episodes of a popular series for virtually no reason, the network is in a funk brought on by Big Brother and a rash of bad programming decisions since, nothing is going to break them out of that funk before summer – they need some clear air and the tail end of a season is not going to give it to them, better to put House into reruns than waste expensive new episodes which nobody is watching.

Lead in – Lead out - Wednesday 15 October 2008

Wednesday was a story of poor lead ins on channel Ten and horrible lead outs on channel Nine

Channel Seven continued to dominate although they ceded 7pm – 8.30 to Nine by a whisker with Wednesdays being the preferred viewing night for Two and a Half Men, what happened next was simply beyond belief, like one of it’s bizarre mysteries the audience for Fringe vanished the latter only retaining 47% of the sitcom’s audience. This is an unmitigated disaster and by virtue of this they have flushed the returning CSI NY down the toilet.

In previous years an audience like this would have had Nine reaching for the late-night button, no scratch that – in previous years this sort of audience never even would have been a consideration, back in 2006 everyone was shocked with the low performance of Yasmin’s Getting Married with figures that were just unheard of – now we’re hearing about these kinds of figures all the time.

Back in 1996 Nine sent Star Trek Voyager packing from it’s 8.30 Tuesday slot all the way to 11pm when it was attracting 300,000 Sydney viewers each airing (extrapolated out you can assume that 300K in Sydney means comfortably over the million mark in the 5 cities – indeed 9 Perth (then run by Sunraysia) kept the show in Prime Time.) So Voyager with an Audience of 1 million gets canned and now barely 12 years later half the audience gets an indefinite prime time run.

I like Fringe, I think it’s a great show, perhaps the successor to the X Files – but I’m in a small minority here and I’m amazed Nine is sticking with it as long as they are!

The other side of the coin is channel Ten, Friends is at 500,000 viewers and sinking – these kind of figures meant the end of Taken Out several weeks ago – hell they meant the end of Wheel of Fortune a few months back on Nine, but Ten is trapped like a deer in the headlights – it doesn’t want to make to many scheduling moves and alienate viewers – but it’s not like there’s that many people to piss off in the first place.

Friends is a good show – I was pleased in summer to see the first few seasons which are actual television classics, yet Friends was a monster hit in it’s day – sometimes commanding upwards of 3 million viewers per episode, with that in mind – it’s a good bet that everyone’s already seen it whereas with Two and a Half Men – a lot of people are only just now discovering it – hence it’s high numbers.

Despite the low nadir of Friends, Jamie Oliver incredibly manages to attract 200,000 more people to his earnest cooking escapades, from here House builds to catch third spot behind Criminal Minds and Spick & Specks.

The ABC has, for almost 4 years now, been causing headaches for the commercial nets on a Wednesday night with their ever changing line-up of local comedies anchored by the Adam Hills hosted game show, I had thought that without The Chaser – the viewers would desert ABC on a Wednesday, but although they’re not there in the same heady numbers, Aunty puts in a solid performance for the night.

Fast Track to Oblivion - Wednesday 8 October 2008

Woah, the first thing you notice about today’s ratings is not the outstanding performance of Two and a Half Men which after a pretty ordinary Tuesday has found viewers more agreeable to a Wednesday broadcast.

No the first thing you notice is House for the third week under 1 million viewers.

Ten is officially in dire straits.

Just last year an episode of House could attract close to 2 million people – ten decided to keep the buzz going by fast tracking the series so that episodes aired barely one week after their US broadcast – the show seemed to lose a bit of steam but still chugged along with respectable figures.

It even pulled good numbers amid the Writers Strike which saw it’s ratings depressed but still afloat.

But obviously a lot of people took the writers strike as their ticket to kick the habit and start a new one with the Serial Killer hunters on Criminal Minds.

To be fair to Criminal Minds – it is a great show, a lot more realistic than a lot of US cop procedurals (read the book Mindhunter ) and repeats very well.

But the precipitous drop in viewers for House is just amazing – are all those people watching Criminal Minds or Spick and Specks? Have viewers tired of the weird medical mysteries, given that it’s on Ten – do people even know that it’s on???

Another fall from grace is Jamie Oliver who at one point was Ten’s golden boy with his rough language and extensive cooking show repertoire – but watching Jamie Oliver after witnessing the force of nature that is Gordon Ramsey is akin to binging on X Rated videos and then trying to get exited at Maxim!

I’ll seriously doubt if Fringe is still here after next week which is a pity because it’s starting to fire but Nine generally aren’t in the business of sticking with a show so I predict that’ll be the first show to blink – who knows what they’ll try in it’s place – maybe 4 eps of Two and a Half Men in a row! Nothing succeeds like excess.

Seven’s 7.30 doco-drama hour (how many of these must we endure per week and why is it that they rate so well???) brought a close second – clearly this fly on the wall reality is working for Seven.

The Mentalist did about as well as you could hope for from an encore screening the test will be on Sunday do it’s number increase?

Finally Life, arguably one of the most interesting shows in Ten’s line-up is suffering behind House and I can see it getting the chop before the good doctor but neither show is really the problem.

The problem with Ten on certain nights has progressed from worrying trend to a full blown catastrophe but more on that later.