★★★★★ 0/5

ABC not to blame for three-way local drama battle

Producers who are criticising ABC for its scheduling of Time of our Lives are dead wrong. Here's why.

21
Leave a comment

Claudia Karvan plays Caroline TivolliI have to disagree with The Australian today which has an article suggesting the ABC has made a “poor decision” in scheduling The Time of our Lives against A Place to Call Home and House Husbands.

It quotes (anonymous) producers as saying the decision was “disheartening”, “stupid” and a case of “putting their d. .ks on the table”.

ABC announced its plans to return drama to Sunday nights as early as April 23. That was just before A Place to Call Home began on Seven. At the time House Husbands was screening on Monday nights.

It then confirmed its drama rollout publicly on April 30.

But then Nine announced it would bump the show to Sundays on May 7 the same day that The Voice began doing its Live results shows on Mondays.

By that stage ABC had already begun its marketing campaign for its upcoming local dramas.

In February this year I specifically asked ABC1 Channel Controller about his scheduling plans for Time of our Lives.

Dahill then told TV Tonight, “I don’t want Time of our Lives and House Husbands having oxygen at the same time because I think it makes both shows weaker. I’m hoping that House Husbands is going early on Nine so that we’ll be kind of middle of the year.

“Once Seven, Nine and TEN declare their hand I’ll have a better idea. I know where I want to play it but I don’t want to send it out to die somewhere or get battered,” he said.

“One of the things people have said is ‘Why don’t ABC play more of their Drama series on a Sunday night?’ So that’s one of the options we’re musing on.”

All of this is on the record.

So it seems ABC can’t win….. Damned if they play premium dramas on a Thursday and damned if they play them on a Sunday.

Producers who are anonymously criticising ABC for supposedly slating Time of our Lives against two local dramas need to get up to speed on the timeline of events -not the end result. Look to the handling of Reef Doctors if you want to criticise the scheduling of drama, not the ABC.

21 Responses

  2. I am more concerned that “Time of our Lives” is recycled version of “Love my Way” and “Tangle” and so far not as good as either. Same actors, same middle class suburban backyard, how about some more original casting. All we need is Asher Keddy and Kat Stewart and we have the four most over exposed females on Australian TV all in together (with Justine Clarke and Claudia Karvan leading the pack)

  3. The Australian is definitely running a campaign against the ABC, and so today’s article criticizing the scheduling of TheTime of Our Lives on Sundays must be seen in this light. Not a week goes by without The Australian bagging the ABC.

  5. I think the problem with Reef Doctors is that it was boring. I watched the first ep and it was really slow and not good at all which had nothing to do with the cast or time of the show. It had to do with storylines which weren’t fantastic.

  6. I am loving this show so far and will continue to watch it. I also love and watch House Husbands so luckily I have Foxtel IQ and can tape two at once. I don’t watch a place to call home as it didn’t interest me at all. But this cast for this show is so good so I hope it continues to be a great show.

  7. Just look at the ABC on Friday and Saturday nights!
    Now that the excellent Silent Witness has finished, they offer repeats of the “quite likeable the first time” Doc Martin! Good grief. No thanks.
    Then the new program that follows (The Bletchley Cicle) doesn’t start until 9.20pm.
    DVD set to record, off elsewhere for something to watch. Madness!
    Then as a complete insult, they give us repeats of Midsomer Murders on Saturday night.
    I don’t even want new Midsomer Murders!
    Talk about a guaranteed sleeping pill!

    Does the ABC even have someone in charge of its programming, or do they just throw darts at a board?
    As for those blaming The Australian newspaper – WTF?
    Shoot the messanger why don’t you!

    P.S. I was once a rusted-on ABC viewer, but no longer!

  8. 3Million people watched Australian drama on Sunday night at 830! Only The Australian could spin that into a bad news story. After a wobbly first ep the figures improved for a more assured episode of TOOL last night. When both HH and APTCH end their runs TOOL will be there for that audience – looking like a clever programming decision. If anything, (apart from a better title), TOOL deserved a movie-length opening episode as it valiantly tried and failed to set up too many characters and storylines in the first episode. It may indeed be better suited to Thursdays but where is the ABC’s Head of Drama in all this? Nowhere to be found as usual.

  9. I don’t understand all the fuss. It got 800K last night which is about what Paper Giants got a couple of weeks ago. Once you take into account iview – and the ABC gets far more viewers via catch-up than the other networks because their platform is so much better – it seems like a solid, if not spectacular, success so far.

  10. Oh well, there are only another 2 episodes of House Husbands this year. So the majority of TOOL will not be affected. Also a Place to Call Home has another 4 episodes, so that will leave just a little over half of TOOL without Aussie competition.

    Its not full on 3 way Aussie competition for the entire or even majority of the season run.

  11. The Australian is partly right. The ABC is a lumbering bureaucracy and easily outsmarted by much more savy commercial networks. But the simple fact is that Time Of Our Lives should have been developed for the Thursday 8.30 pm slot. But having watched it for about 15 minutes last night I don’t think it would attract a big audience there either. It is pretty self indulgent, middle class angst material and the idea of it as series television week after week is too much for me. Perhaps it would have worked better as a short form series like The Slap but it just doesn’t have anything as interesting to say as The Slap did.

  12. Ridiculous, but not surprising, article by the Australian. Just another salvo in the ongoing News Ltd (“we fight for freedom of speech on behalf of all Australians”) political war on the ABC. Also, who says Australians aren’t smart enough to choose between three dramas at the same time? After all, we seem perfectly capable of choosing between three reality programs at the same time.

  14. I would have thought that ABC may have shown it on Thursday nights which is a pretty weak night on TV,in my opinion. Saying that though I enjoy The show on ABC I watch that and then playback Elementary after Graham Norton and then watch A Place to Call Home on Thursday nights. Simple really. House Husbands I give it a miss, it may have improved after the first episode had a young child driving a school bus…really.have not bothered to watch it since.

  15. I agree that TOOL’s first episode wasn’t totally gripping, but few first episodes are as characters are established and the general thrust and storyline gets under way, but last night’s episode was a beauty.

    I don’t care who’s fault it is, but I really lament that 3 good Aussie dramas are up against each other, while the rest of the week is filled with talent quests, reality shows, repeats of repeats of American sitcoms and general crap (interminable footy shows). And on top of all this, SBS schedules its new program with Ellen Fanning, also at 8.30 Sundays.

    It’s crazy and I hate it.

  16. So what if the ABC announced their schedule months in advance. Seven and Nine had similar plans, which they didn’t announce and were able to get their local dramas established with strong following first, with Ten likely to do well with Masterchef and Elementary.

    If the ABC is going to launch a flagship programme in the slot it had to be good enough to take viewers away from establish high rating shows. The ABC continuing with showing TOOL on Sunday nights knowing this was suicide and a major ratings blunder. But viewers can watch it on Sunday nights, DVRs or iview, whenever they want.

    The fact that the ABC only has Thursday night when few people are watching dramas and Sunday at 8:30pm available is a product of their programming policy. It helps them retain mostly older viewers who are rusted on to the ABC but costs them whenever something like this happens, and it is not the first time.

    The Reef Doctors saga was a result of boardroom and management changes resulting Ten chasing 3 different plans in a couple of years, and the fact that stripped contest shows have rendered family drama obsolete. This left Sunday 6:30pm as the only slot Ten had to show Reef Doctors in, and it failed and got bumped — happens often these days.

    With hindsight the solution was to just give up on Reef Doctors as a ratings success and use it to build image and share last summer. But either way viewers can get to watch it if they want so it doesn’t matter.

    Neither Reef Doctors or TOOL are that good and they both had poor quality first episodes which contributed to their problems.

  18. What a sorry state of affairs our industry is in if producers are complaining that local content is going up against local content. This should be a common occurrence! We should have enough local content that it does go up against other local content.
    I’m embarrassed for this country that an article like this has to even be written. Imagine someone from overseas reading the article in The Australian, the first thing they’d think would be “What’s the big deal of local content going up against local content?” And when the penny drops it would be followed by “wait, do they hardly have local content? That’s sad.”
    Very sad indeed…

  19. Of course Ten made a monumental stuff-up with the scheduling of Reef Doctors but this scheduling by the ABC is sheer madness. Once they discovered Seven and Nine both had dramas on Sunday night, they should have been smart enough to move their drama to Thursday.
    This show is better than House Husbands so it would be extremely disappointing that its ratings were lower. Not surprised that it is behind A Place To Call Home though because that show is top notch too.

  20. I blame Nine and to a lessor extent Seven. Nine moved HH well after ABC released it’s plans for TOOL and Seven probably have APTCH locked in for Sundays months ago.

    To don’t think ABC is a tool here (See what I did) 😆

    Also TEN could have chosen a better night for RD, maybe it would have done good to just put in on Friday nights but at the more family friendly time of 7:30 followed but TLR?

Leave a Reply