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!

Stacks On!

Sundays are the it day again, last year the advent of Masterchef and (more importantly) Sunday Night proved that 60 minutes was no longer the immovable object it once was.

To respond to this new paradigm Seven and Ten are piling on Sunday nights with some of their biggest shows, although Seven big early evening hitters won’t be back until next week, Ten debuted a new lineup with last year’s breakout hit Talkin’ ‘Bout Your Generation and the new, heavily hyped US drama, The Good Wife.

While Generation came up against stiff competition, the Good Wife, and House came up trumps giving Ten solid ratings to boast about.

Nine is currently rumoured to be brining Underbelly into the Sunday night fray either after the Winter Olympics or after Easter, it should be a game changer if it can repeat last year’s performance on a bigger night, but more importantly will it restore some sheen (and perhaps relevance) to its lead-in 60 minutes?

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!

Sometimes it's good to move House...

After spending an entire summer scraping the bottom of the ratings barrel, channel Ten suddenly burst back to life with one week to go before ratings season begins, and against some tough competition.

The last Sunday of January has for the past several years featured the same tussle Tennis vs Cricket vs Dance.

As usual Tennis came out on top with a healthy average of 2.4 million viewers, Nine did respectably enough and Ten's big franchises pulled in nice numbers, the real suprise of the night was the 9.15pm showing of House, a show that last year was looking long in the tooth, turns out it was just up against too many other good shows (and newer ones at that, as this blog pointed out some months ago) it pulled a fairly decent 1 million viewers a much more encouraging start than this show has had in some time.