Gone: Fringe
Another big US drama is kicked to the kerb as Nine drops Fringe, to be replaced by The Mentalist.
- Published by David Knox
- on
- Filed under Programming
Nine has just pulled the plug on one of it’s big new dramas, Fringe.
The big budget “thrilling new drama” the network recently promoted as with a big marketing push has been pulled from it schedule effective immediately.
Nine will instead move The Mentalist into its place from next Wednesday at 8:30pm, followed by CSI: NY.
This week the series rated a disappointing 671,000 viewers -thrashed by Criminal Minds’ 1.47m, beaten by Spicks and Specks 1.23m, and pipped by House’s 885,000 viewers.
The complex, futuristic drama starring Australian actors Anna Torv and John Noble has fared better in the US, holding most of its 9million viewers and winning a full series.
Nine has had trouble with its Wednesday line-ups, already pulling Kitchen Nightmares USA and McLeod’s Daughters from the 8:30pm timeslots, the latter last aired to 931,000.
Nine has also had a run of bad luck with sci-fi shows including Moonlight, Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles all under-performing, while Seven’s Bionic Woman and Heroes had uneven results and Torchwood and Battlestar Galactica were moved by TEN onto TEN HD.
When Nine announced with considerable fanfare that it had picked up the rights to Fringe, readers on this site were sceptical, vowing to download it for fear of Nine pulling the plug on the show.
Tim Worner, programmer at rival Seven, recently commented on the difficult game of programming saying, “The aim of our game is to try to please most of the people most of the time and it’s a very tricky equation.”
No doubt Michael Healy concurs today.
Plans for a special by Mythbusters on October 29 are also now shelved. Nine is yet to announce plans for unaired episodes of Fringe and a regular Sunday show where The Mentalist was sitting…
UPDATE: A spokesperson for Nine said Fringe’s fastracking was complicated by the US election but could not confirm a new timeslot for the series yet.
Kindly link to this site when sourcing or posting in messageboards, thanks!
122 Responses
I am not a sci-fi fan but loved this series. Didn’t watch it last week oly due to the fact that I was watching the Aussies beat Qatar for the World Cup Qualifiers. How do I download this?
I struggle to understand why the channels chop and change their programming so much. All shows are going to go through there highs and lows, but surley it is better to ride them out and build your audience. Like many others have mentioned, I will also download the Fringe now. This means when Fringe comes back on in Summer or whenever, I won’t be watching because I will have already seen them.
As for the Mentalist – lets see how long it lasts – even if it is a good show. I’m sure a lot of people won’t realise it has changed to Wednesday at first – or already have something else they prefer to watch on Wednesday nights.
Oh well, from memory, Seinfeld got dumped in its first season and ended up one of the biggest shows ever.
And tv stations wonder why people download tv shows!!! I have pretty much given up on free to air tv, have had pay tv which is also crap. Best thing to do is just download all the shows you want to see and then you get to watch them when you want and with NO adds.
I really enjoyed Fringe and am disappointed at Channel 9 for dumping it.
Im all for downloading the eps of the net but not everyone has access to super fast ADSL with unlimited bandwith. i.e. me! No access to ADSL where i live, still on dial up so it makes it almost impossible to download anything of the net longer than a 3 minute song off bigpond!
Sorry Jesta, not true…. it ran from 8:30 -10pm in schedule. Nine also sent me the full preview.
I like that a lot of you have said “I couldn’t get past the first episode” as a way of explaining that this is not Ch9’s fault – it still is!! – Ch9 Australia cut the run time of that episode from the US 81 mins (8pm – 9:35, with limited ads) to standard 45mins (8:35-9:35, normal 15mins ads) and expected the storyline to still flow – no wonder most of you tuned out after Ep1.
I have to admit, I taped ‘Fringe’ in favour of ‘Spicks’n’Specks’. . . good luck knocking that show over Ch9… No mentalist for me.
one of the networks needs to sack their programming director and get a new one, someone with some spunk and courage, and who will make a decision and stick by it rather than just panicking every morning the ratings come out. i know television is a business, but what other business gets away with treating the consumer like this? imagine if you went into a supermarket, wanted to purchase a product but at the checkout were told that you cannot have it because the quantity that it has sold so far does not satisfy the stores expectations, it is then removed from your hands and put back on the shelf to wait there until a sale. you would be outraged and would never go back after being treated so rudely and that business would get such a reputation that they would go out of business. so why do television stations get to treat people so badly- because it is pretty close to a monopoly, you could just change the channel but you get the same treatment from all the commercial networks (a collusion which i feel is akin to price fixing among competitors), you can go to another supermarket however and that is how you put them out of business. but what other station can you go to, if you don’t want to pay for tv and you don’t like the offerings on abc or sbs- there is no where else to turn, if one of them changed their behaviour and became trustworthy the viewers would flock.
I congratulate Channel 9 for killing another show. By the way I wasn’t watching “Fringe” (except the first episode) because I rarely tape anything and it was against “House”. Now they will kill “The Mentalist” the same way. I’ll admit I watched that because Channel 2 has crap on during Sunday nights at the moment. But as soon as they put something worth watching on it wasn’t going to be a great loss when I missed it. Oh well another show bites the dust. I don’t mind because I’ve disliked that network for years and it’s just confirming its worthlessness again for the seemingly millionth time.
Angeloz
It’s the cereal and whiskey that got to me…
And here I was starting to like the Nine Network for Fringe, The Mentalist and new CSI. Then they do this. They better put it back on, and soon. I’m really loving this show.
No wonder I hate Channel 9. Yet / another / good show sacrificed for corporate greed. Loyalty is earned, not given! Couldn’t 9 at least give the Fringe (and all the other series they’ve abandoned) to the ABC? … they know how to respect their viewers.
Very disappointed. Nine could have put it on HD. By shelving it, they have ensured a lower rating if/when they do decide to show it in the future, because many would now turn to downloading.
To the Spicks & Specks fans, ABC has started showing repeats at 5:30-6:00 am Mon-Fri on ABC1.
I’ve been enjoying Fringe, and have been watching it on 9 because of it being in HD. I had a concern they’d pull it prematurely though, so I have also been acquiring it by other means just in case. Any chance 9 had of me paying attention to their ads has now been lost. Let’s see if the Mentalist shares the same fate.
Very disappointing, but not surprising news. Fringe will live on in downloads.
James, Spicks and Specks is repeated on Thursday nights on ABC2. I love ABC2’s time shifting to avoid “log jams”
Nine are still acting like the pathetic bunch of losers they really are.
When will these people learn that to get the ratings and dollars they need viewers to watch their channel.
Treating shows like this is why people like me are fed up and don’t bother anymore and now get lots of our series fix from the internet.
Now that we can download in good quality why would you want to be held to ransom if you want to follow a series.
Bout time a few of the Nine exec’s got the axe and not the shows.
The commerical stations just aren’t giving shows a chance to form a fan base. As soon as the numbers drop somewhat they yank the program. You have to wonder what on Earth the programmers are thinking. Soon we will be watching 20 to 1 20x a week and Wipeout 10x a week. Prison break pulled over 0.6million people last week at a 10.40pm time slot. A smart programmer should have given it a bit of thought and put it in a 9.30pm time slot – figures would have shot up.
Channel 9 can rot in hell. It was bad enough that they were cutting the show to fit in the ads but this is just typical. What is it about the commercial networks. If they actually started treating their audience with some respect and concentrated more on entertaining the audience rather than their pathetic and childish squabbles with each other, they might start to see some loyalty from the audience.
I was enjoying Fringe, I mean I know you can’t please everyone all of the time but nine hyped it up so much that they should have given it a couple more weeks at least. Oh well, I guess we’ll have to add it to the download list.
Sephiroth_FF putting programs on just the HD channel is better than not screening them at all.
Getting access to the HD signals can be a one time fee of around $90 for a HD set box.. you don’t need any special TV, that is just if you want a HD quality picture.
At least it reduces the log-jam on a Wednesday night at 8.30pm. I already had my iQ recording Spicks and House, one DVD recorder recording Criminal Minds and the fourth doing Fringe. If it weren’t for Arena+2 (and now daylight savings, which chaqnges the Foxtel program times in Qld) Fringe would have been bumped behind “Project Runway”. I had to dump something to watch the Socceroos game this week, and the one that had to go was Fringe. So I guess I just “rescheduled” it a week earlier than 9.
Everytime at the end of each episode when they said “a new case each week”, I got a chill. It really is unfair to do this. It’s not like they’ll replace it with anything good. I mean The Mentalist is just being moved from a different timeslot.
And I don’t see the point of shafting shows to the HD channel. They’ll get MORE viewers on the SD channel since a lot of people still don’t have access to the HD channel.
Obvious to those that take time to post here (most with valid comments) that Nine just does not get what the viewing public wants.
Maybe they should just ask us.
Come to think about it, the regular posters on this stie could easily programme their lineup for them with MUCH more success.
Heck, we would even get theme for each night viewing working in sync
P.S. I would also change Voiceover that tries to promote/highlight shows…
Ch 9 hasn’t changed the listings on it’s own web site yet, for Fringe, Mentalist or the new Friday night line up.
I think the last ep they aired was less than a day after the US, but that makes little difference for years of mistreatment, late starts, and everything else wrong with channel 9.
Should we all cut our hair and send it in to 9 to save fringe ?
Bah, too much effort, 9 lost me again now, ill just download it, they have to learn once they delay something even for a week, they will lose a large percenatage of their audience. I think in future i will just download any Sci-Fi program that i want to watch cause no channel treats them well.
I look forward to the day when they revamp the ratings system to actually mean something.