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Ratings roof collapses on Neighbours

Next year TEN might want to re-think its habit of concluding Neighbours out of ratings season.

It’s finale on Friday night only attracted 600,000 viewers, a pitiful effort for such an important episode. Both Today Tonight and A Current Affair had over 1m.

Significantly, on one night in the final week of ratings the show had 929,000 viewers. And ending during ratings gave Home and Away 1.2m viewers for its finale.

As we all know a soapie season finale is one of its big events of the year. They are designed to bring viewers back in the new year. They involve long set-ups and generally, with elaborate shoots, cost a lot more production dollars too. The “roof collapse” finale of Neighbours (which sounded a lot like the finale of 2004) wouldn’t have been cheap.

To have them overlooked by audiences is hardly cost effective television (not to mention making everyone work a bit longer before their holidays).

Neighbours returns Jan 14 when we learn who has made it out alive, which is beginning to feel like something of a metaphor at this point.

Week 50

12 Responses

  1. Please don’t advocate a shorter run for Neighbours. I would rather see the ratings period extended to cover the whole year, rather than have this idea of ‘non-ratings periods’ which lets the networks fill the airwaves with rubbish. If we had the ratings run throughout the whole year, like they do in the UK, then maybe we would have more quality shows produced and shown throughout the whole year.

  2. I respect the writers of Neighbours decision to steer clear of crazy storylines since the july change, but the show has become rather bland. Episodes contain very little action and development, it has become very frustrating. Plots are dragged out for weeks! Although the plane crash in 2005 was a little bizarre, it was far FAR more entertaining than some teen rave roof collapse. Yawn.

  3. Neighbours has the potential to do something new, but they don’t. The same old types of predictable story lines combined with a cast of mostly boring and annoying characters is killing the show. I still watch it, but it’s boring and predictable now. Kill the Parkers off for a start!

  4. I know there are people who still enjoy this show but my personal opinion is that after 20 years, its time to put it to rest.
    With all soaps, they tend to have same storylines but different people and consequences.
    I dont watch this show and going by the commercials, its looks really old and haggard, no matter how they keep changing things around.
    I hope that with flagging ratings, that the producers of the show would consider to end it in 2008.

  5. I’m just hoping Dan Bennett didn’t bring back a loved character like Libby to just kill her off for the shock value as he did with Chloe on Home & Away which I am still annoyed at…

  6. Phil, whilst the ratings are vastly different day to day , the weekly average is usually between 700,000 & 700,600

    last week average however was 677,100

    I would really like to see the weekly average hit 800,000 early next year

  7. I’ve been disappointed with Neighbours since the relaunch. There really hasn’t been much to keep me watching (although I still do).

    The finale wasn’t that good. I thought it was a bit of a lazy storyline myself. And get rid of Ned!

  8. I thought the finale was spectacular and it’s a HUGE shame that the ratings were so dismal. Neighbours is finally getting back on track and the past three months have been some of the best the show has had in years. Too bad nobody’s tuning in to see that.

    Also the ratings have been all over the place these days. Over 900,000 at one point and then the next week it falls to the 500,000 mark. It’s strange. They don’t have solid ratings.

  9. i was quite dissapointed by the finale on friday. it would have been good that if by the end of the episode that at least one main person had been rescued. the pylon crashed thursday… you would have thought they could have saved one person instead of just showing the parents waiting and the trapped making small talk…

    but it wont stop me from watching next year either 🙂

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