★★★★★ 0/5

The Pacific 1.59m beats Hey Hey 1.52m

Channel Seven's Pacific miniseries has beaten Nine's Hey Hey it's Saturday by 72,000 viewers.

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The Pacific has beaten Hey Hey it’s Saturday in its first outing for 2010.

Channel Seven’s wartime miniseries netted 1,593,000 viewers over Nine’s nostalgic variety outing on 1,521,000 viewers -a win of 72,000 viewers.

Seven’s drama peaked on 1.88m viewers and ranked #1 in key demos 16-39, 18-49 and 25-54. Hey Hey peaked higher on 1.92m.

Both shows were biggest in Melbourne, where Hey Hey pulled 603,000 viewers and The Pacific 509,000 viewers. But Melbourne was the only city in which Nine’s show bettered Seven’s.

The win for The Pacific is also more impressive for the fact it started and finished an hour later. The earlier hour for Hey Hey should have favoured it more in final results.

The two-way brawl sent the competition home. So You Think You Can Dance Australia took 832,000. Spicks and Specks was down to 782,000. But The Biggest Loser appeared to stay the course on 969,000, up from the previous night.

The Seven Network also managed to win the nightly share with 33.7% over Nine’s 30.7%. TEN sank to 17.3% in the brawl.

After Nine’s big figures for Underbelly and Top Gear, it was a much needed victory to Channel Seven.

The Pacific will be repeated this Saturday at 11.05pm and next Wednesday at 12midday plus 9:30pm Sunday on 7TWO. Nine is yet to indicate if it will satisfy a call from fans to air Hey Hey on Saturday night.

Week 16

This post updates.

67 Responses

  1. The Pacific pales in comparison to Band of Brothers. It’s boring, long-winded and looks like this generations version of The Sullivans. (Yes I’m old enough to remember how tragic that series was)
    I would wager that 99% of the viewing audience are only sticking with this crap as B.O.B was so good.
    Very disappointed after the 4 eps I’ve watched. So much so that I think I’ll start watching Hey Hey again…..God, can’t believe I just said that.

  2. Deadwood overdid the swearing; there was so much of it it just got in the way of all the other dialogue and was distracting. The Pacific is nothing like that show.

    Someone wrote on FB:

    Leckie writes about how it was used almost as punctuation in his memoir, p. 17 of the paperback Bantam edition with series tie-in cover:

    “Always there was the word. Always there was that four-letter ugly sound that men in uniform have expanded into the single substance of the linguistic … See Moreworld. It was a handle, a hyphen, a hyperbole; verb, noun, modifier; yes, even conjunction. It described food, fatigue, metaphysics. It stood for everything and meant nothing.”

  5. I think i have to rethink who I am….. I got called a Bogan for watching and liking Underbelly, i get called a half wit for thinking two and a half men is slightly funny…. and now im being called white trash for loving Hey hey……. seriously….. where did i go wrong……. I always make sure i look nice, treat people with respect and work extremely hard at my job…… how could i end up such a loser (and i know i only mentioned channel nine shows, but they are the only ones that im attacked for watching). I’m so sorry im not a Bones watching, Kochie loving superhuman like the rest of you…. i will try to be a better person like you.

  6. I quite enjoyed The Pacific, am a bit of an anti-war person, but this looked incredibly well done. I’ll have to watch the encore though because good old Seven not showing it on time. Started recording bout 8.35, my 2 hr disc stopped with i dunno how long left of the episode. Thanks Seven. Shows already running late, you don’t have time for an ad and news update.

  7. Thank goodness! A little faith in the Australian viewing public has been restored.

    It’s great to see the other networks band together against the evil Nine & slowly kill off this modern day minstrel show – let’s call them ‘Band Of Networks.’

    ‘We shall fight in the lounge rooms, we shall fight in the pubs & clubs, we shall fight in the television board rooms & on media chat rooms, we shall fight in the hills with transmitters; we shall never surrender!’

    That said, the lovely Livina Nixon needs her own show already…

  8. Great stuff Hey Hey really enjoyed it.You can never draw comparisons when both shows started and finished at different times.Pacific fans remember this is a mini-series it’s going to be gone before you know it

  9. @ mac – Although I did not watch a minute of Hey Hey It’s Saturday, it only finished about 10 minutes late and I know because I was recording Big Bang Theory, in fact I set it to record for an hour when only intending to watch the first ep (since the second one was a repeat), in case Hey Hey went greatly overtime. So I was pleasantly surprised.

  10. I probably would have checked out The Pacific if Hey Hey wasn’t on (at least some of it anyway, as I also like Lost and Fringe – which I recorded both last night), but Hey Hey took preference as it is a live show and with the Pacific it can be seen anytime.

  12. Tom Hanks addressed the swearing on The Colbert Report a month or so back. He said that’s how the soldiers talked back then. People can claim it’s not accurate, but it is.

    Personally I suspect there might be a little of the thing they did in deadwood. They slightly comtemporised the swearing because other wise the language would seem off and lack impact.

  13. Considering the amount of money it cost they would have expected The Pacific to rate much better. I doubt underbelly cost that much and drew a much bigger audience.

  14. @Kenny — You are very wrong about the armed forces and the “F” word. It was used frequently and commonly, particularly during battle. Documentaries from the time mention it; men who served say it was in use. It’s naive to say it was “never used”.

    Gore-hounds wanting wall-to-wall battles are better of going and playing Xbox. This drama is about the men’s stories as much as the war itself.

  15. I didn’t even turn on hey hey, I think it was something about the ‘specials’ last year that got me watching.

    I’m glad the pacific is being repeated though, I’ll be able to tape it in a higher than VHS quality.

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