Note to Seven: Hitler is dead - Monday 12 January 2009

Well Monday saw an increase in overall viewers on the previous week, a lot of that was no doubt helped by Ten scheduling something that people wanted to see with the Ashley Judd thriller (one of many Ashley Judd thrillers) Double Jeopardy proving a big switch-on for the net with an almost 100% lift in viewers!

Even the soon to be departed Out of the Blue got a 50% week on week boost beating Scrubs!

Scrubs was a victim of Seven’s idiotic scheduling – removing a proven second hour of Bones for a documentary about Hitler… WTF?? First of all haven’t there been enough documentaries on Hitler? Those in the viewing public wanting their WWII fix are probably already hardcore subscribers to the Hitler, err History Channel.

I’d love to find out (and I guess we will next week) how many watched The Golden Globe Awards, in years past Ten used to draw over a million viewers to the January spectacle – making it a good platform for promotion, but after last year’s writers strike it seems to have fallen into the hands of cable TV, which, although better equipped to telecast it live, has a much smaller audience base.

The Rich List rebounded with no cricket to distract it’s followers and How I Met Your Mother is doing quite nicely – it is probably summer’s top rating sitcom and will no doubt be launching new episodes right out of the gate unlike last years haphazard start.

The Ex-Network - Monday 8 December 2008

As was the case with Last Monday – the ABC dominated by showing something people actually wanted to see – with the final part of The Howard Years and the final episode of Enough Rope winning their timeslots.

Bones pulled a more than respectable number for channel seven as did the Rich List. Surely the Rich List has now earned a 3rd season in 2009.

Ten seems to be in worse shape this Monday than last with it’s entire prime time line-up well an truly in the tank, last week’s semi-bright spot Army Wives lost whatever good will it had established whilst the defunct Ex-List sunk into 90210 territory , I’d be surprised if it is still around next week.

Nine’s line up was depressed, but with next week seeing a whole new post 8.30 schedule for ABC, they should regain some older viewers from the pubcaster.

The Timid & the Ugly - Monday 1 December 2008

The first Monday of summer played a lot like the last Monday of ratings season with The ABC’s one-two punch of Howard and Enough Rope knocking the other contenders around, with channel ten well and truly out for the count.

During summer I think it’s safe to consider 900,000 the standard barometer for success. With that in mind ABC, SEVEN and NINE all had great nights. Top Gear took a hit but still came out respectably.

Bones did at 8.30 what it was doing at 9.30 anyway, but The Rich List continues on resurgent. In fact the Rich List’s revival poses a weird dilemma for Seven – here they have a show which only seems to work on it’s Monday timeslot (it bombed on Saturdays) and yet they don’t really need this show as Border Security and The Force bring much higher ratings to this slot during the season – perhaps Seven should trial it on Thursdays (a weaker night for them) and see what happens?

Gratifyingly Scrubs is returned to a 10.30 slot and look, OMG it wins the timeslot (a very competitive one I might add) and brings 64,000 people who were not watching Out of the Question.

The Question for Seven is why have you idiots let this show languish at 11.30pm for 5 years? Last night as I watched this show, just to add to Seven’s stupidity they carried a commercial for the upcoming DVD release of Season 7 which is the season they are screening right now – how do I know this? Well simple on of the scenes they showed on the commercial was identical to what I had just viewed in the preceding segment.

There’s still two episodes for Seven to screen of this season before it hits the stores tomorrow, why they never tried to get this show back into primetime is beyond me, but hey we can get the DVDs I guess.

Fringe did better at 9.30 than on it’s last 8.30 show by 62,000 viewers so that’s something good. Watch to see if it improves week on week, it’s still an awful drop from it’s lead in but it’s still better than earlier in the year.

Ten had some OK news and some really bad news. In the OK file – the ratings for the first ep of Bold & the Beautiful didn’t suck – they didn’t bring down the house (a great rating would have been closer to 700,000 considering the competition) but they point to a solid start which is good. Even better is that Friends has shown some slight improvement at 7pm over Will & Grace (will Ten just TRY the Office here already) given it’s a rerun against a world of new (and news) it did OK and certainly cannot be blamed for the travesty at 7.30…

Like I said in an earlier blog – any show purporting to be about nudity in the 7.30 hour is clearly false advertising and thankfully people aren’t total fools so they gave this show (which bombed in the regular season) the flick. Expect to see an announcement of a third Simpsons/Rules of Engagement hour any moment now…

Army Wives did better, considering the lead-in and the competition from established hits but The Ex List got less viewers than Bold and the Beautiful and dragged Out of the Blue down with it. Ten needs a strong 7.30 show, I don’t expect them to be able to beat Charlie Sheen or Top Gear, but surely The Rich List is such a disposable show that their audience can be picked off with ease – it won’t be achieved with a failed reality import – that’s for sure.

90210 No – Monday 24 October 2008

Ouch!

I can’t even look – I’m just going focus on the other channels for the moment.

Nine, Seven and ABC all enjoyed a close tussle for control of the Night.

Nine kept their Monday buzz going with a retrospective on the old 90’s show Weddings, that show was quite popular in it’s hey day being one of the original fly on the wall series attempted in this country.

A rerun of CSI gained week-on-week beating City Homicide into second place with The Howard Years Part II a close third, Cold Case also showed a slight gain week on week but was still in fourth place with Enough Rope taking the slot for the ABC.

The Good News Week Awards did OK, no scratch that – in light of it’s lead in it did magnificently with over 200% retention!

The big stories of the night though were at 7.30. SBS which rides on 5-6% audience share, wheeled out a new season of the UK Top Gear (after several weeks of middling performance of the Australian version) and saw their numbers lift spectacularly – It’s easy to think that people just ignore channel 28, up there on the lonely UHF dial while everybody else parties on VHF, but when SBS get a hit going the people come running.

The Rich List saw a 200,000 viewer lift in their fortunes week on week, at first you think – good for them they’re picking up, but I submit to you a theory – if there’s nothing on that viewers want to watch then mediocrity wins out.

These were the Audience Shares for FTA in the 7.30 hour (by my reckoning)
9 25.74%
7 25.07%
SBS 22.11%
ABC 18.63%
TEN 8.45%

8 percent, 8… That is horrific. As Ten’s 7pm timeslot has lurched from disaster to even bigger disaster their 7.30 timeslots have taken a beating but this is the absolute worst 7.30 beating they have ever sustained.

Ten has shown some faith in the new 90210 by reintroducing it for summertime but where are the viewers? 7.30 is arguably a better timeslot for a teen drama than 8.30 but they just didn’t show up.

I’m not sure why – the new show is well made, it’s not embarrassing to watch, it contains a lot of continuity for fans of the original and it cracks along at a breakneck pace, so why aren’t people watching it.

Here’s my (crackpot) theory…

There’s no buzz, or rather, all the buzz is centred on what old 90210 star will next appear, does anyone know who the stars of this new series are? Let me put it another way…

Back in 1992/93 did anyone NOT know who Luke Perry and Jason Priestley and Shannen Doherty were? They were megastars at the time, helped a long in large part by the behind the scenes feuding, but Ten rode out a year of poor ratings (1991) with the show on Friday nights before it caught on with kids here and (more importantly) in the US.

The next big Teen thing was Party of Five – Ten waited two years to bring it out – by the time they did Scott Wolf (remember him?) and Neve Campbell were on magazine covers everywhere.

Back in 1997 the WB Launched Dawson’s Creek – ten waited until 99 to introduce it here by which time Joshua Jackson and Katie Holmes were fully on our radar even though we’d never seen them in anything.

In effect Fast Tracking (in the initial years) may be a teen show’s worst enemy. There’s no hard and fast rules of course some teen shows never take off or generate any buzz (One Tree Hill, Gossip Girl) my point is that although I don’t think it will go this low again (it’s moving to Sunday nights with a better lead in than Will and Grace and less competition) Ten is going to have their work cut out for them getting it to catch on with audiences.

The only thing that can help this show in the short term is for Rob Estes to take his young co-stars down to the Viper Room for a night out (with Paparazzi in tow) – or perhaps Lori Loughlin could introduce the kids to drunk uncle Jesse!

Brisbane boosts the numbers - Monday 17 November 2008

An interesting night of TV last night with Nine getting Blitzed, Ten getting better and seven getting slightly richer. Overall viewing numbers were up last night across the board. Including SBS there were 5.1 million people watching Free to Air TV at 7.30 last night – out of a population base of 13 million (for the 5 metro cities) that’s pretty good.

ABC has been pulling respectable numbers all year for Four Corners which ended it’s season last week to make way for the four part doco – The Howard Years (one part for each term in office I believe) it was definitely interesting, especially whenever Peter Costello had something to say and I’ll definitely be either tuning in or recording the last 3 instalments.

Andrew Denton, who needs no assistance with his ratings was actually down by 200,000 on the previous week, but his show really rises and falls on the guests he has on.

Looking at the other networks – Seven had a massive start to the night with Seven News, no doubt boosted somewhat by the storms in Brisbane – both Seven and Nine News had inflated figures in Brisbane as locals tuned into the coverage with Seven Brisbane netting 400,000 (Up 110,000 or 37.9% week on week) and Nine Brisbane welcoming 322,000 (Up 110,000 or 29.3% week on week) this also proves that after years of being the last state well an truly welded to Nine’s 6pm bulletin, Brisbane has indeed made the switch.

The Rich List improved by 90,000 week on week, which is good, no doubt helped along the increased numbers watching FTA. Given how inexpensive the format is no doubt some Seven execs are hoping that it maintains a decent performance throughout November.

City Homicide tied (that’s right tied) with the Howard Years which is good for a rerun. Nine were also in a rebroadcasting mood with the 8.30 CSI a repeat, no doubt a defensive move in light of the ABC’s play into the slot for the next several weeks.

Another episode of Domestic Blitz (is this the regular timeslot now?) went very well for Nine, next year I can see a game of quick draw between Nine and Seven to see who can get their franchise into the slot with fresh eps first, Blitz or Border Security.

Over on Ten it was the first outing for Out of the Blue, while the turnout was substantially down on Ten News (Ten News typically pulls over 450,000 in this timeslot, more during winter) I would have expected that – the key is – does it build (meaning will audiences follow it and will it be worth retooling for early evenings) or will people desert it? Stay tuned for that one.

Still on Ten, something unexpected happened last night, blame the wild Brisbane weather – but they did it – they got their four shows over 1 million! That means this week they could potentially have 6 shows over 1 mill by the end of the week. It probably won’t do much for their overall shares but total audience counts as well, especially when it comes to promoting future shows.

Cross Promotional Blitz - Monday 10 November 2008

Ah the joys of cross promotion, take Backyard Blitz a program which specialises in taking hard luck cases and transforming their backyard (cuz what you really need when your life is shit is a bird fountain and a patio right?).

As if this winning formula wasn’t enough to bring in the hordes, Channel Nine decided to combine the power of their shows by locating one such unfortunate family whose daughter was profiled on a 60 minutes story about Tourette’s syndrome, and give their house the makeover.

It is actually very clever programming and combined with zero competition it did the business for Nine last night.

Not doing the business however was just about everything else scheduled. CSI lost almost 70% of that golden lead in getting beaten into a baffling second place by Enough Rope. In America CSI still attracts 18 million people per new episode – these episodes are FAST TRACKED virtually days after the US broadcast and yet Nine can’t seem to muster up much interest.

Even worse is the result for Cold Case, not so bad given the 10pm start but really, they can do better than this. Did they even let people know it was on? The promotional departments at Nine and Ten seem to have packed up for the year.

Proving that not all television viewers are lobotomy survivors the 7.30 report beat The Rich List into third place (in the slot) which itself beat Idol back to fourth.

What is remarkable is that just like water – a lot of Monday shows seem to have found their own level, The Rich List seems frozen under 1 million, Aus Idol results always garners around 200,000 less than the Sunday show, Supernatural always loses 150 – 200,000 people from Good News Week. Even Will & Grace has hit a ceiling stagnating week to week. If Ten could get a show together at 7pm that attracts 1 million viewers then they might have a decent shot but right now they’re relying solely on the core audience for their prime time shows and as we can see here – that isn’t enough.

Lowering the Bar - Monday 3 November 2008

Wow, what a difference Australian Customs makes! These guys pack up and a whopping 600,000 viewers leave with them. Seven's replacement The Rich List (a last ditch attempt to save a one season wonder from the scrapheap) saw more than 700,000 viewers lost week on week.

The loss at 7.30 didn't help their 8.30 tentpole City Homicide (albeit a rerun) which recorded a timeslot loss against a first run fast tracked CSI.

By removing their factuals - Seven has essentially lowered the bar, allowing Nine to walk right over them.

Two and a Half Men pulled in it's usual good audience but the suprise was a timeslot win for Til Death finally over 1 million viewers, Nine can chalk up a win for sticking with this sitcom, unfortunately Til Death just got taken out of Fox's schedule for November sweeps - a move like that is NEVER a good sign - cancellation almost certainly follows so the Brad Garret sitcom is suddenly on the boil on it's home turf.

One of the weirder things to happen was the 9.30 timeslot. While Cold Case only retained 63% of it's CSI lead in, Bones retained a whopping 85% coming first in the slot with Andrew Denton's Enough Rope a close second.

While Nine jumped over the bar this week, Ten continued to limbo right on under it with nothing acheiving. Australian Idol had their best result on the night, but still copped a third place in the slot. Good News Week is struggling to get noticed at 8.30 - it doesn't help that runs against 4 Corners in what is a resurgent year for the ABC Public Affairs program, last night profiling the American state of Ohio in the lead up to tomorrow's presidential election.

A bright spot for Ten though was Will & Grace improving week on week by 12%, is it just a fluke or will Ten's health in the slot start to improve. Keep watching this space...