★★★★★ 0/5

Nine scores the week

State of Origin powered to a record 2.28m viewers, helping Nine win the week. But TEN wins 3 key demo groups while ABC finished the week with its editorial tail between its legs.

16
Leave a comment

sooWeek 23 saw all the biffo on Wednesday night. The State of Origin hit a high of 2.28m viewers -a record for the event since OzTAM ratings commenced. It helped Nine win just its third week of ratings over Seven. It was also the same night that The Chaser’s War on Everything offended large portions of the viewing audience with its now-notorious sketch.

Nine won the week with 27.1% over Seven’s 26.4% and TEN’s 24.5%. The ABC had 17.1% and SBS 4.8%.

As expected, Nine won Sydney and Brisbane with Seven snaring all other cities. Sevenand Nine took three nights (Seven: Sunday, Friday and Saturday / Nine: Monday, Wednesday, Thursday) and TEN landing one (Tuesday). ABC was equal second with TEN on Saturday.

Significantly, for the second week in a row TEN wins key demos 16-39, 18-49 and 25-54.

State of Origin was the top show for the week, with a whopping 2.28m viewers. It peaked at a huge 2.68m viewers and the broadcast topped the 2.14m for the third match last year. It took just under 1m in Sydney, 834,000 in Brissy while in Melbourne 328,000 viewers tuned in, not bad given the state’s interest in another code. Elsewhere for the network, Nine News (Sunday), 60 Minutes, Sea Patrol, Getaway, A Current Affair and 20 to 1 all performed as did Monday’s new Two and a Half Men. The Footy Show did well to nab 1.06m viewers across its late timeslot, even if the majority of it was for AFL rather than NRL. But homeMade continues to drag, with the network biting the bullet on its scheduling. Tuesday nights still struggle across the board, and will surely remain problematic with current programming.

Seven News continues to dominate and spearhead the network’s evening line-up for the network as it did for so many years on Nine. Sunday’s edition was the week’s best with 1.83m. Also strong were Today Tonight, Sunday Night, Bones, The Zoo, Find my Family and Better Homes and Gardens. Less successful was the Border Security USA / The Force double, which dropped audience in between Sunday Night and Bones. Blame MasterChef Australia for that. Home and Away continues to feel the bite too. The Jonathan Ross Show premiered to 452,000 -down slightly on the 500,000 or so usually won by Boston Legal in the same slot. The network snuck in a repeat on Thursday at the expense of King of the Hill. New Idea TV has a long way to go before Judge Judy is thrown out of TEN’s court.

Glory continues at TEN with new product. Talkin’ ‘Bout Your Generation‘s 1.62m viewers have effectively not blinked since its premiere. If TEN can keep this up for even half the run of Spicks and Specks they will be laughing. MasterChef Australia took a cool 1.56m on Sunday and won its 7pm slot every night this week (clarification: some eps 1 hr). NCIS, Merlin, Rove, Recruits, Good News Week all did good business. Alas, Law and Order: SVU languishes in its Wednesday timeslot -now both against State of Origin and without it. Meanwhile Criminal Intent does nicely thankyou in its old Thursday slot. Rules of Engagement has picked up and quiet achiever TEN News at Five has been topping 1m viewers.

A controversial Chaser’s War on Everything was best for ABC with 1.16m viewers followed by Spicks and Specks‘ and New Tricks both on 1.13m. Doctor Who topped the 1m mark while ABC News, Australian Story, Silent Witness, Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story, The 7:30 Report, The Bill, Four Corners and Media Watch all scored. Q & A‘s replacement Mask and Memory was a long way behind the forum show’s regular audience.

Top Gear Australia is slipping viewers each week, thankfully not too many. It was the network’s best with 595,000. The network also launched SBS TWO this week but will be lucky to see any unique programming in the week’s Top 100 for a long time.

Week 23

Amended.

16 Responses

  1. @ Peter: Nine will show the next State of Origin in Perth and Adelaide in primetime as it occurs on the same night as Wimbledon (June 24). There is no way Nine will show the game at 4am in those cities, after the tennis.

  3. Sport shouldn’t count in overall ratings measurements. Nor should News. Both of those things aren’t based on quality programming, they’re either random, or scheduled, events, which are either wholly unpredictable, or specifically predictable. To me, that means they should be noted, but not counted towards, a channel’s popularity.

  7. Agree with craig, dino ect. If you look at the other weekly wins by nine, the first was the first rating week, which had the premier double of underbelly among others. The second weekly win had the logies, and this one had the SOO. So until nines next big event (prob the next SOO), they wont be winning anything. Also, i wonder if they might not show the next SOO in primetime in all states. The numbers in Perth & Adelade were under 100k! A repeat movie would get higher numbers!
    Good job to ten though; nobody at the end of last year could’ve predicted that they’d do this well.
    Wonder what people will tune into without the chaser the next few weeks?

  9. Judging from the furore over the Chaser last week, it’s amazing anyone watched the Origin at all. Yes, that’s slightly sarcastic. I’m sure half the people outraged over the Chaser stuff never saw the skit, or even watch the Chaser at all.

    Pity Nine has nothing else of note to capitalise on the Origin.

  10. Says a lot if Nine can only will with the backing of State of Origin, good on them but they still have a way to go before they are ‘still the one’ once again.

  11. TEN’s market share is growing, and with winning the demographics they must be laughing their asses off right now.

    Good on TEN, Seven and ABC this week!

    TEN’s dwindling Thursday nights are growing, their Friday nights should be stronger now with MasterChef and SYTYCD. TEN coming equal second on Monday night was a big suprise! Supernatural’s ratings are starting to climb slowly, and might probably settle around 800k. It’s good that they haven’t been messing around with their schedule too much. Harper’s Island and Law and Order was pretty fair to be bumped, seeing as they were getting under 500k in very high priority timeslots.

    Seven went pretty darn good considering how far in front Nine was at the end of the week, and ABC coming equal second on Saturday was amazing, considering it’s the second time in a row now!

  13. According to OzTAM, the revised total audience for State of Origin 1 was 2.322 million, one of the best figures for the series in recent years.

  14. They are a long way from ever taking the no.1 winning network off seven, they only won on the back of state of orgin and you see the next 2 wks seven will bury them again and win back the wks but they could win the 2nd and final 2 orgins match wks but seven will come back with there winning formula win the rest of the year with rafters, city homicide and bunch of new shows they win bury nine.

  15. Pretty close week, considering Nine had the huge rating SOO. The fact they couldn’t even win a key demo would also have to be quite worrying.

    Nine were third in Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth this week. It was merely their wins in Sydney and Brisbane – thanks to SOO that got them over the line. Will be interesting to see how they hold up this week, they could even fall to third…

Leave a Reply