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)

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!

Oh Mr Sheen

Thursday, 24 February 2011

It's just depressing isn't it, we should just close Thursdays down and forget about it.



You may have noticed if you're reading this blog on a regular basis that I've chosen to ignore Fridays and Saturdays, that's mostly down to the fact that apart from the smaller audiences, the schedules start to get ridiculously fragmented as different states follow their different football codes. A few years ago (and you can rifle through the posts in 2009 to check it out) I attempted to make sense of this haphazard scheduling, but I don't even think the networks themselves know if there's a net benefit to splitting up their schedule by state.

It will be interesting to see if this is the first year where the multichannels can carry the sport live into the outlier states when it comes to NRL and AFL.

As for Thursday night, The Biggest Loser and Home and Away are the only things anyone is tuning in for.

Look at Two and a Half Men at 7pm - only half a million viewers and now getting regularly beaten by Ten's 7pm project despite having a superior lead in - Nine needs an alternative 7pm show pronto and they must know it - it's dragging down their whole night.

The problem for Nine is - What can they put in there - not a game show - they're played out, there's no other broad appeal sitcom that has as much strip potential as Men and a new newsprogram up against ABC News and 7pm would be fatal.

There's always Entertainment Tonight or TMZ I guess (I'd totally watch TMZ if it was on at a decent time like a few years ago) or maybe Nine could be brave and kick off their nightly sked at 7pm rather than 7.30, maybe that's too brave. Whatever happens they will not tolerate low figures for Two and a Half Men for that much longer - they need an alternative soon!

While I'm on the subject - What the hell is going on with Charlie Sheen check out this story on TV Tonight I think Sheen is going off the rails and it wouldn't suprise me if Two and a Half Men has taped its last show.

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.

3rd place is no Loser

Sunday, 30 January 2011

I think all three nets can be genuinely happy with their Sunday night this week. Well maybe not Seven, but the other two.



On the surface 1.3 million for Tennis looks great - but when you consider its the Men's Final - a match that has routinely pulled in 2 million viewers in years past you can see that Tennis has a slight problem.

Ten had an excellent Launch of their big new Sunday lineup with the constant promotion for The Biggest Loser and Hawaii Five-O paying off over the summer.

Modern Family meanwhile, confirms that Sitcoms are back in vogue with both eps pulling excellent numbers.

Apart from The Big Bang Theory on GO! there was nothing much happening on the netlets.

A moment in the sun

Sunday nights are shaping up to be a real scrap with the return of Seven’s Factual Skeins giving them the edge over Talkin’ ‘bout Your Generation which dropped a whopping 19% week on week.

It isn’t being helped by Biggest Loser which fell 13% week on week. With this continuing decline as the young audience breaks off to watch anything but analogue FTA the viability of this show has surely got to be called into question.

Still – it’s one of the few reality shows I can think of that has a video game out at the moment – so it’s not all bad!

So help me – I am not making this up!

Bones got the edge over The Good Wife thanks to its superior lead in coupled with a natural erosion of the sampling audience. Similarly it was close between Castle and House.

Nine would be happy with the performance of its Cricket and Olympics coverage, this is like a moment in the sun for sports on TV because as the year wears on and the country splits in two over their football preference the audience sizes will start to look more and more pathetic.

Whatever we're watching - It's just not cricket

Tuesdays are another night I'll be watching with interest as Nine attempts to shake up Seven and Ten's duopoly on the night. Frankly Top Gear can't come soon enough as people seem to abandon cricket when presented with more exciting options.

Indeed both Biggest Loser and My Kitchen Rules were up 200,000 viewers a piece on the previous night, while the return of NCIS absolutely thumped channel Nine. NCIS LA - though a rerun - did not fare as well, though the 800,000 seems pretty standard for a 9.30 rerun.

While I'm talking about that - 9.30 reruns seem to be all the rage at the moment, Nine is rerunning The Mentalist 9.30 Monday and Thursday, Seven is rerunning Thank God You're Here 9.30 Thursday, perhaps with the 9.30 slot's diminishing returns we will see the advent of American style 2 Hour primetime schedules.

I hope not.

Lose some weight

Monday nights have been in place for two weeks now and there were very few changes, Nine’s Monday comedies came off a little from their premiere figures, Big Bang was beaten in its slot by Australian Story.

The 7pm Project was up slightly, but disastrously The Biggest Loser went down by 17% the biggest drop on the night.

Without following TBL this year I can’t say if the drop is due to the content of the show, perhaps it’s the target audience, a lot of whom would also be amenable to watching Seven’s My Kitchen Rules which only airs twice a week to Loser’s six times!

I don’t know about you but if I were an avid reality viewer with limited time on my hands I might splice it between the two shows.

The moral of this story is – now that it’s at 7.30 – The Biggest Loser could possibly stand to lose some weight!

Of course the greater moral could be to move it back to 7pm where it will enjoy a greater install base and therefore better ratings.

Of course – that opens up the final half of the year problem, but so far 7pm isn’t proving to be the solution!

The 7pm Reject

You know how I could tell that I'd barely watched any free to air TV over the summer - I was genuinely shocked to come across Grey's Anatomy last night! Seven's decision to bring this to Tuesdays seems to be a good one as the series struggled to get attention on the older skewing Thursday night.

Ten meanwhile continues to sink, the 7pm project barely scraped past half a million viewers, you'd wonder how far Ten's "commitment" to this show extends. Despite being the only fresh material in its timeslot over summer it actually went backwards and a general lift in audiences hasn't helped at all.

7pms performance seems to be affecting not only Neighbours before it but the Biggest Loser afterward. Although Loser has always performed better after 7.30 than before - this year it seems to be struggling and given its start time against varied competition, viewers may find it easier to opt out in deference to other 7.30 shows, that if they'd started watching at 7pm.

Unfortunate Reality

After opening on Sunday night with a quite respectable 1.1 million viewers the Biggest Loser plummeted on its second outing falling more than 300,000 viewers in the process.

While it certainly wasn't helped by its lead in the anaemic 7pm Project (674,000 viewers and a distant fourth) a bigger problem may be the controversy surrounding one of the contestants who is up on some very unsavoury criminal charges, subsequently that contestant has had to be excised from the show in the editing room which is reportedly causing all sorts of headaches for viewers trying to follow a narrative jumping around more than your garden variety Tarantino film.

Ten just can't take a trick with their reality shows of late, last year's public lynching of Kyle Sandilands completely sucked the oxygen out of Australian Idol, now this story which is just off putting and unfortunate - what's next? Maybe a Masterchef contestant turns out to be a cannibal!!

Speaking of Masterchef, Seven's cash-in-o-rama had an uninspired sampling given the amount of promotion the show has gotten over summer, perception is working against them with this show - it feels like it's ripping of masterchef and it feels like it's ripping of My Restaurant Rules, still it did better than Loser so it could turn out very nicely for Seven.

Nine meanwhile steamrolled everyone else with their comedies and (lo and behold) a consistently programmed hour of The Mentalist all timeslot winners!

Thankyou MasterChef Australia

I've haven't watched more than 5 minutes of it, but I'm going to miss Masterchef.

For a ratings nerd like me the results of the past several weeks have been unadulterated fun.

Because Australia's ratings system put emphasis on the whole of prime time rather than the core 7.30 - 10.30 period, nights are often won on the strength of the 6pm hour, which for Nine and Ten means a local news bulletin followed by tabloid current affairs.

Almost two decades ago, Ten bowed out of the 6pm race preferring profit over glory, so ever since the 90s, television ratings in this country has been a two horse race, Seven and Nine. Dull, dull, boring and dull.

But not this year. Amazingly Ten's 6pm hour is unchanged for almost a decade, but this show, Masterchef, has become such a viewer magnet, a watercooler show, an all ages crowd please, it has caused all sorts of upheaval all over the schedule from one end to the other!

Ten has had successful 7pm shows before - but nothing like this, among the shows which will be glad it's over next week you can count

Better Homes & Gardens
Has seen it's aud fall away by approximately 200,000 viewers as it clashes with Masterchef's Friday Masterclass - an ingenious idea which stands apart from the competition proper as a cooking class for the masses. I knew this was a good idea when I was invited by my mother-in-law (not in ten's target demo) to try a dish she learned on the Friday night show!

Nine's Factual/Reality department
Masterchef brought a quick death to such unforgettable fare as Missing Pieces and You Saved My Life forcing Nine to fall back on their current crutch - Two and a Half Men, a show repeated so often this year it's starting to look transparent.

Working Dog
What an embarrasment, Masterchef has proven revenge is a dish best served hot! At the end of last season all looked lost for Ten as its one remaining hit show, Thank God You're Here, defected to the Seven network for more money, the expected crowds for the lazy laffer were at first subdued as the first half hour butted heads with Masterchef, later Thank God was almost totally subjugated by some strategically placed 90 minute episodes! Seven didn't buy that show to run interference, they bought it expecting a big number which never came!

Home & Away
In recent years the departure of The Biggest Loser was the signal for people to flock back to Summer Bay, not this year - the venerable soap has endured an unremittingly harsh climate for the past 7 months, first with Loser, and now Masterchef culminating in the ultimate insult for the show - the first time (in my memory at least) that it has ever been outrated by Neighbours!!!

So thankyou Masterchef, whatever your actual entertainment value, it has been fantastic to see this kind of upheaval to the status quo - wishing you all the success in the future!

It's all about to change

It’s worth noting that the often repeated Harry Potter franchise has finally reached the point of diminishing returns for Nine, not one of the reruns has average a million this year, not even on the high traffic Tuesday night.

Next week they’ll be going for gonzo with the US reality train-wreck Dance Your Ass Off – which can be neatly described as The Biggest Loser meets Dancing with the Stars! The fact that this show featured neither Darryl Somers nor Ajay Rochester is a plus and I wish them all the best!

Ten and Seven were neck and neck – at least across the night, with Masterchef blowing away it’s competition early on and NCIS shoring up the late hour, though Seven feasted on Prime Time with the return of Surf Patrol making a strong impression and Packed to the Rafters dominating the 8.30 hour.

At least for Seven this is the last week they’ll have to worry about Masterchef spoiling their Tuesday, for Ten the question is, was NCIS’ poor performance due to ‘special time’ or is this a sign of things to come?

Shaken up Sunday

Some big changes afoot on Sunday night with the return of Dancing with the Stars pushing out seven's current affairs skein (Sunday Night) and their fly on the wall hour.

Dancing with the Stars was heavily promoted for several weeks with the promise of seeing a blind man dance and it seems that viewers were only too eager to check it out.

Though 1.5 million is nowhere near the lofty heights of the show's early years - it's way better than last season and a marked improvement over last week's schedule for the net.

The move also pushed Bones in front at 8.30 with Rove dropping back on account of a weaker guest lineup, also Rove's shorter running time meant an earlier Biggest Loser, doing more damage to Ten's overall evening share.

However, Ten can pat themselves on the back for showing a "special" on their drama hit Merlin in the 6pm timeslot giving them a 69% increase in the slot week on week.

Nine's decision to sked in a Hugh Grant movie (a premiere at that) may seem logically sound but it didn't work out that way with viewers already preferenced to the ongoing series on rival channels, there isn't that many remaining viewers to woo, and one off movies aren't going to draw people away from regular hit series.

Masterchef paying dividends

Tuesday 5 May 2009

It may be too early to call it, but I think we can assume that Masterchef is starting to pay Ten dividends.

Last year viewers were actively tuning out from Ten with the bloated corpse of Big Brother stinking up the place, once all the viewers had gone, even burying Big Brother wasn’t enough to entice viewers back, people needed a reason.

Of course, that reason was The Biggest Loser, a reality contest that still has life left in it and gave viewers a reason to switch on Ten and stick around, but these reality shows only last a certain number of weeks so whatever was coming to replace Loser had to not suck.

So far Masterchef is doing the job, holding its ground in a competitive 7pm timeslot and even getting a bit of watercooler buzz (someone yesterday told me they watched, and this morning I got a text from someone else asking me to identify the theme song, the joke’s on them cuz I haven’t watched a complete episode!)

The payoff for ten is not so much the 7pm performance but the stability of their Prime Time schedule, witness a good launch for Recruits on Monday and a great launch last night for the new quiz/game/panel show thing Talkin ‘Bout Your Generation. It has to be one of the best starts ever for a Shaun Micallef project, the lawyer turned comedian was always the most original and funny in the Full Frontal cast and his shows The Micallef Pogram and Newstopia are among the funniest Australian Television of the last ten years, it’s nice to see the man have some success.

This success was all the more extraordinary given the performance of a doco on Seven about a Lion (???!?) there was about 5.1 million viewers watching free to air at 7.30 last night – an excellent result for the industry.

Then again, what the hell happened at 9.30, putting aside that the universally panned Kitchen Nightmares did better in Melbourne than an Underbelly (season 1) rerun did in Sydney (surely Gordon Ramsay’s Full Throttle F***fest would be a better fit with the mind in the gutter antics of Sheen and Cryer, but I digress.

The bigger problem at 9.30 was the spectacular fall of Ten Years Younger in Ten Days! The metaphorical arse has fallen out of this makeover show. Debut attracted 1,348,000. Second Week 1,226,000. This Week down to 990,000 that’s 358,000 viewers (26%) gone in the space of two weeks, has to be the most rapid haemorrhage since Aussie Ladette to Lady.

Wow

Monday 27 April 2009
Wow, just fucking wow!

I didn't think a four year old show, a reality comp at that, was capable of 2 million viewers anymore especially not against the year's biggest drama Underbelly, but Ten seems to have played it right giving Loser a massive send off and delivering a huge first night for Masterchef.

Not only that - but check out the figure for Neighbours!!! Over 1 million!!! Has that even happened since the 80's??

Big Week

Sunday 26 April 2009
Every April for the past several years Ten has a really big week, and this is the one, that’s when the finale of the Biggest Loser meets the premiere of Big Brother.

This year of course the scenario is a little different, Big Brother is no more, the show a victim of a myriad of bad decisions in the final season coupled with the standard viewer decline.

The Biggest Loser has surged in recent weeks and pulled in a very good result up 293,000 viewers week on week and 313,000 ahead of its nearest competition.

So You Think You Can Dance, by contrast, has limped along at times this year and although week on week it improved 281,000 viewers it struggled to hold sway against 60 Minutes and Seven’s The Force which has slotted into Sunday nights nicely.

Last Year the finale of Dance scored 1.8 million viewers, this year there were 416,000 less watching with an almost uniform decline in every capital.

What the show seemed to lack this season was buzz, if anything Biggest Loser had more press going in thanks to the behind the scenes antics of Ajay Rochester and Shannan Ponton whereas the dancing comp has been buzz-free since its return.

I’m not sure how ten can liven things up next year – some are suggesting a later start to the season, others are suggesting a new night.

Season three seems to be the point where ten starts mucking around with the format of these shows, for Big Brother season 3 saw the two-houses gimmick, Idol had change thrust upon it thanks to a Dicko defection, so the precedent is there, but also in both those cases a change in the format was followed by an audience decline.

A quick note that The Evidence seems to be doing well for Nine in the 10.30 hour and Bones actually beat CSI last night!! Perhaps people really were tuning in to see Grissom!

Remember to watch this space tomorrow, it’s gonna be a big night, the premiere of Masterchef, the finale of The Biggest Loser – up against, of all things, Underbelly, also the premiere of Eleventh Hour and Four Corners has a special on the recent Vic Bushfires which should see a good result for them.

Fourth & Down

Thursday 23 April 2009

The Footy Show really did well last night in Melbourne netting an average of 413,000 viewers over an almost 2 hour span becoming Melbourne’s second most watched show of the night behind Today Tonight.

As The Biggest Loser races toward the finish line Home & Away continued to flounder, it has placed third or lower on every night this week aside from Tuesday (a night which Seven dominates) that’s a poor showing for the long running soap.

Home & Away has proven itself durable, but also vulnerable, especially to Ten 7pm flights of fancy. In the early part of this decade it was Big Brother which gave Home & Away very real problems at 7pm, with only Nine’s lacklustre 7pm performance for comfort.

These days Nine is resurgent with reruns of a sitcom which still has 2 more years guaranteed (and could conceivably run for another 4 years on it’s current form) and Ten is about to launch Masterchef, how Home & Away winds up for the year will depend a lot on how audiences take to Ten’s new reality play.

Seven continues to swing for the fences on Thursdays making it their 3rd night playing for 16-39 year olds behind Monday and now Wednesday, the return of Heroes did alright but I wonder how long it will last before getting the Lost & 24 treatment?

The Twilight Phenomenon - Sunday 29 March 2009

Ten made off like a bandit yesterday recording only second nightly win of the season, again thanks to sport.

The network’s coverage of the Australian Formula 1 Grand Prix ran into prime time in Melbourne and Sydney resulting in a later start time for the Biggest Loser and a boosted audience to boot!

TBL was up 131,000 week on week hitting a season high 1.4 million viewers, So You Think You Can Dance also found favour with 1.3 million watching over the two hours.

Nine’s best was 60 Minutes which has settled at the 1.2 million mark so far this season – while City Homicide matched the Dance audience and pushed CSI into third place.

Border Security was the night’s top show (screening at 8.30 in Perth) with 1.5 million viewers. Sunday Night, seven’s newsmagazine went head to head with 60 Minutes in Perth (due to an AFL twilight match), it came third in that market with 60 minutes first in the slot for Western Viewers.

Overall it was a very close night with no discernable turkeys, there was barely 100,000 viewers between first and third place all night, a testament to sound programming from all quarters.

Sunday 22 March 2009

Sunday again continues to be close struggle for all the nets with only the 7.30 hour putting Seven out in front. Viewers have well and truly put aside 60 minutes for the more visceral experience of Seven’s factual offerings.

Meanwhile Dexter’s ratings last Sunday looked to be a mirage, either the show dropped by 342,000 viewers week on week or it was initially timecoded wrong resulting in an inflated rating for the first week.

The tussle at 8.30 continues to be tight with less than 3,000 viewers separating the crime shows. Backyard Blitz, now rumoured to be axed lost 84,000 viewers week on week while The Biggest Loser picked up an extra 94,000 and Sunday night brought in another 129,000 (the night’s biggest increase)