Burn Notice gets (another) burn notice

As anyone watching Burn Notice last night would have seen, TEN has withdrawn the show from current scheduling again.

On this occasion it disappears after just five eps, replaced with movies on August 25 and September 1.

This is a disappointment to fans who also saw the series pulled earlier this year.

Last night the show attracted 851,000 which is actually not too bad a figure for TEN during the Olympics. The more concerning problem -and a more logical factor for its removal- is traced back to pre-Olympics, when it attracted figures around 600,000 – 800,000 in a 9:30pm timeslot.

TEN has promised to return the show “later in the year” when it can benefit from an uninterrupted run. TV Tonight understands TEN’s forseeable scheduling has too many interruptions, presumably from Idol, to allow a continuous run.

It’s certainly disappointing that more planning didn’t go into accommodating this when TEN chose to return Burn Notice. But programming is a movable feast.

TEN would probably argue that if more people came to Burn Notice it would have stayed put. Fans would argue that it’s impossible to commit to a show that doesn’t remain on air, and that on-going treatment with favourite shows builds a distrust that can be rectified with downloading.

TEN is not alone in this contemporary trend. How networks deal with it is but one of their newer challenges…

Missing in Action