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An empty House at TEN

Only someone as smart as House could tell us what went wrong with TEN's Wednesday.

After starting the week so well, TEN’s healthy figures dropped through the floor last night, coming fourth behind the ABC for the evening.

An 18.4% share is disappointing on any night, but doubly worse when you look at what appears to be a competitive line-up. TEN programmers must be scratching their heads today and who can blame them?

A season premiere of House, fasttracked by little more than a week attracted a lacklustre 914,000 viewers. TEN should have been looking past 1.25m for this, minimum. Instead that went to Criminal Minds (1.32m), with most viewers switching from Nine to Seven for that part of the night. Nine had a staggering 1.54m viewers for Two and a Half Men -an episode they belatedly pushed in place of Hole in the Wall at the last minute.

Meanwhile Bondi Rescue: Bali (645,000) and Kenny’s World (754,000), two locally produced series, couldn’t compete and gave House no leg-up into its season premiere. It will be a source of frustration to TEN that investing in a hit series, and a Logie-winner at that, has not paid dividends for Bondi Rescue.

As usual ABC TV played “commercial spoiler” with their loyal Wednesday shows Spicks and Specks (1.22m) and The Hollowmen (906,000).

Life (740,000) managed to better Kitchen Nightmares USA (712,000) for TEN.

Nine put in a good performance (27.1%) but Wednesday again belonged to Seven (31.4%).

At this point in the week TEN’s strong start has now slipped back to its usual third place:

Seven: 29.9
Nine: 24.9
TEN: 22.4
ABC: 17.4
SBS: 5.4

Week 39

30 Responses

  1. DimitriaK, I found Two and a Half Men to be the most cringy-worthy, irritating, corny and unfunniest piece of crap to come out on the US in a LONG time. There’s been other bad things but none worse than this. I simply cannot stand it.

  2. Brizvegas – Life had 3 eps held over from season 1. As a result next week Ten will air episode 10 – part 1 of the season final, and ep 11 the week after. It was really annoying as if they aired all season 1 eps last year the storylines would have had proper closure and they could have started off with the true new 2nd season. Season 2, beginning with episode 12, should begin around Oct 14.

  3. I think you’ll find the reason 2 & A Half finally worked is because Nine left it in a consistent timeslot allowing it to build a loyal fanbase & exposing it to viewers that may not have invested in it previously . Numbers started under 900k in late Jan then gradually built from March. It is now a monster – but needs to be rested before it reaches the tipping point…..like yesterday.

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