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2.23m: Underbelly kinghits the ratings

Channel Nine smashed the competition last night as a staggering 2.2m of us defy viewing trends and return to watching Australian stories on the small screen.

Hold the phone, Australian television isn’t dead just yet.

It just got a major shot in the arm with a whopping 2.23m viewers watching the first hour of Underbelly last night. It is the biggest TV audience so far in the ratings year.

Nine’s third series blew the opposition out of the water, also netting 2.07m for the second hour.

Updated: The first hour peaked at 2.84m and Nine claims with regional viewers the two hours averaged 3.04m viewers.

The competition was left in Nine’s dust, with 1.17m for Bones and 831,000 for Castle on Seven. TEN’s Good Wife slumped to 809,000 and House took 568,000. The ABC’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles was a mere 419,000 and Dateline on SBS was 118,000.

Nine’s good fortune didn’t end there with 60 Minutes nudging 1.5m -although Domestic Blitz‘s 1.18m was beaten by Sunday Night on 1.3m. Seven’s best figure for the night was Seven News with 1.74m while TEN’s was Talkin’ ‘Bout Your Generation on 1.1m.

Meanwhile on GO! Top Gear took another big 379,000 -which is very likely a record for digital channels. The Big Bang Theory pulled another big 346,000. GO!’s 5.4% share was bigger than the entire combination of SBS ONE, ABC2, ABC3, ONE and SBS TWO. It more than doubled 7TWO’s 2.5%.

The result of both Nine and GO! saw the Nine Network carve up a staggering 40.6% share last night, thrashing Seven’s 27.7% and TEN’s 18.1%.

But the news is also a win for the industry and viewers.

It proves yet again that Australian viewers do want to see Aussie stories on their screens, and it comes at a crucial time when network executives and advertisers had feared the landscape may have permanently changed. There has been much debate over what number now defines a “hit series.” Ahead of marquee shows including The Pacific, Hey Hey it’s Saturday and MasterChef Australia a new benchmark has just been set.

Game on.

Week 16

42 Responses

  1. I finally got around to watching the first episodes today. Not having seen the previous two series I don’t know how it compares (but earlier comments saying it’s better than series two don’t engender much confidence I must say) but boy what a disappointment The Golden Mile is!

    Some good actors doing some very pedestrian work as well as some poor actors doing what you’d expect. Writers making a hash out of some wonderful source material. Sigrid Thornton was so bad as Geraldine the Fed I found it hard not to burst out laughing. Someone needs a Sea Change, bad.

    And then there’s the grating, fake gravitas and massively wrong background narration telling the dummies watching everything that’s going on and who is who. This is supposed to be a drama not a documentary, you’re supposed to show not tell! Clearly Nine don’t think their audience can follow the story without lots of help (I wish I could believe they are wrong). Telling us that the hospital is “over a mile” from the Cross (we’ve been metric for thirty five years now, most of the actors starring in this piece of tripe weren’t even born when miles were still in use). Good God almighty, they even felt it necessary to tell us what Kim Hollingsworth is thinking after her first night as a hooker!

    It’s just an appalling mess that makes me embarrassed to think it’s going to be seen overseas, in places that have seen real dramas like The Wire. Please God let them drop the voice-over for the export version. Please.

  2. Underbelly ratings proves only one thing that the avergae IQ of this country has dropped considerably. That people will sit and watch and enjoy a show about scum that are leeching off our society. These pigs are feeding off the misery of people lives by supplying for one thing, drugs that destroy whole families lives not to mention anyone whose been beaten or killed by these bottom feeders. And here we are sitting in front of the box lapping it up. I know that some will say it’s just harmless escapism but obviously their lives have never been violated by these evil losers.

  3. @nic…… thankyou for your response…… it is clear to me that you and i arnt bogans, but embrace shows like Wildside and Janus….. ill even go back and say Brides of Christ and Halifax FP were certainly international quality (i never saw phoenix)…… but my comment was more in relation to the people who somehow call us Bogans for actually embracing the UB series. It was the topic at work yesterday, and everyone that had such a strong opinion on the show either didnt watch it, or claimed ‘i tuned in for a minute’, which is certainly expressed here. Why these people have such strong and damaging voices when they have nothing to do with something is beyond me. Nobody is switching off the good wife or bones, so they can certainly just change the channel….. but obviously 2.3 million people arnt bogans or dumb for being excited to see something that is made right here in Australia

  4. Some of the acting, writing and period detail is a bit suspect, but I’m willing to forgive that. Compared to the general standard of Australian drama production lately (I’m looking at you, Rescue Special Ops and The Cut) this is dynamite.

  5. I hadn’t yet watched UB3 when I read David’s glowing ratings review and the comments below this morning and so settled down tonight to watch it. After fast-forwarding the expected 50-odd minutes of commercials – don’t know how anyone has the patience to watch it in realtime – I have to say that I’m hugely disappointed. UB3 is so bad I don’t know where to start. Most of my gripes have been mentioned by others below, but I will say that the only good acting I saw was from a grey cat and the guy in the white suit who smokes constantly. They were the only faintly believeable characters in a production that smacks of pantomime and self-indulgence. Why-oh-why does every good TV idea have to milked to death by the networks? I think I’ll let Rip Torn’s character in The Larry Sanders Show say it for me:
    “We should warn people to watch this show through a pinhole in a piece of cardboard”.
    Very sad really.

  6. @bigkev

    I don’t think it’s so much a case of slamming local production, it’s just expressing a pov. And I speak for myself here: For me my gripe is that Australians have been hesitant to embrace what could be considered good local production in the past. I can think of solid drama that has been usually ignored for commercially safe production. Whilst this is great as it gives our actors and crews work, it means that other productions are largely passed over. One has to only look at produced drama from the last ten years or so. I’ll name a few memorable productions such as Janus and Phoenix, also going along a similar plotline of crime family vs the law story. Back in the late 90’s we had Ben Gannon’s Wildside which embraced that seedy Cross and brought it to film for all to see. Of course the former three produced dramas I mentioned didn’t come close to the sort of following UB commands. While Wildside explored the seedy element of the cross it was sometimes crtiticised for it’s language, photography methods, ad lib lines and story content. But, it did portray the cross in all it’s dirt, violent and depressing dead end way. UB 3 seems to go for a more Romeo and Juliet MTV approach.

    People know what they like but most of all know what they don’t (like to see – on commercial telly anyway) so hats off to 9 for achieving that. UB has a few good forerunners it can tip it’s hat to, allowing it to become nationally accessible ratings gold. Hmmm, Rachel Blake in UB. Now that would up the anti!

  7. I admit I am a Underbelly Junkie….but so far, its better than series 2….which was dispointng…long way to go before it reaches series 1 standard, but feel it may be heading that way.

  8. I thought it was okay. I enjoyed the storytelling although I found it hard to believe that it was set in the late 80s, they could have used some sort of cinematography filter & made sure that items in the shot weren’t invented after that period. Also, some of the acting was very good while some was bad, but overall, it was satisfactory, I think it’s at least a step in the right direction for local productions.

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