The law of inverse proportions

Wow, the Biggest Loser was the top rating show for Thursday pulling 1.2 million which has to be one of its biggest hauls this year.

Every year the audience for this show builds in the final weeks, it's almost inversely proportional to the amount of jiggling on display!

The AFL Footy Show had its anniversary which explains a timeslot win for the first time this season.



Over on digital there was a big turnout for Stargate Universe, but Star Trek TNG dropped out of the top 50 despite airing one of the best first season episodes (The Big Goodbye)

Question Time

If GO! didn't have the Big Bang Theory they would be in the doldrums. In spite of showing over 9 EPISODES PER WEEK, the show is still GO!'s biggest.

Coming up in the digital world is Ten's scifi double of Stargate Universe and Star Trek The Next Generation. While Star Trek is amazing in so far as its a 23 year old show with zero promotion beating out other digital fare, but Stargate Universe is now in the top tier of digital shows along with Big Bang, Heartbeat and Neighbours as pulling over 200,000 viewers per episode.

Of the main channels - I have some questions:

How much longer can Nine justify the production costs of two separate Footy Shows to draw less than 700,000 viewers?
How on earth does Ten get any traction for their sickly US dramas?
What evil magic continues to keep Home & Away in rude health?
How much longer will Nine wear the 7pm ratings of Two and a Half Men?

The Shape of things to come

Thursday, 17 February 2011

Interesting that Thursday nights in the US are also a fight between Grey's Anatomy and CSI, also interesting that just as in the states both show are hurtling towards irrelevance at a breakneck speed.



Still they're doing better than The Good Wife which the space of a year in looks like its on the way out or at least to a later time.

At the moment with Ten if it's not NCIS its not attracting viewers to 8.30. In fact across the networks' extensive roster of US dramas only the long established shows are doing the business. Bones, NCIS, Criminal Minds - all these shows are old and replacements like Blue Bloods, Parenthood and Hawaii Five-O are struggling in comparison.

This does not bode well for the future when these aging hits finally shuffle off to cable reruns.

Over on Digital personal favourite Star Trek - The Next Generation is struggling inder the weight of its woeful early episodes, best for 11 is again The Simpsons, 7 can be happy with The Next Karate Kid which almost doubled the audience of last week's Karate Kid III and The Big Bang Theory continues to shine on GO!

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.

The Hypnotist

As much as Sunday night heralded the start of a tough new season, Monday seemed to pass by with networks asleep at the wheel! The Zoo get's 1.5million viewers!? The Zoo - now I didn't watch it but with a title like "Miracle at the Zoo" I'm betting they're talking about the Elephant recently born at Sydney's Taronga Zoo which vets beleived would be stillborn. Certainly there'd be some interest in that - but 1.5 million people! Wow, why bother spending money on a script or actors at all when you just poke around a zoo with a camera!

Meanwhile in other depressing trends the top show at 8.30 was a rerun of The Mentalist! A Rerun! Kudos to Nine for hitting on their own flavour of crack (not unlike the kind peddled by NCIS over at Ten) where people will suck up reruns on multiple nights and love every minute of it. I've not watched enough of this show to ascertain but perhaps in addition to a Mentalist Simon Baker is also some kind of hypnotist.

Granted if an ep of Star Trek the Next Generation comes on, I'd watch it even if I've seen it a hundred times, but that's a personal thing on a cult show - is the Mentalist like that for some people? Is it that good?

While Star Trek may not get the kind of ratings I think it deserves, at least there's still an audience out there for science fiction as evidenced by the timeslot win for CSI Miami

YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH

Introducing Television Rave

It's not all negative - sometimes I have good things to say as well - especially about the shows that get f*cked around by those idiots in programming!

I'm starting with Star Trek The Next Generation - which is a personal favourite - providing reviews of individual episodes of the show but eventually I'll cover other classic shows on there as well as first run stuff where appropriate.

A few rules - I'll only review something if I've watched and I'm not interested in synopsis only comment - if you want to find out the story check out wikipedia or TV.com or any number of other resources.

Finally the Rant continues here but if you want to Rave then click...