★★★★★ 0/5

2.56m for MasterChef finale, but it trails 2010 results.

TEN wins Sunday with an impressive 2.56m for MasterChef The Winner Announced -but it's a long way behind 2010's 3.96m.

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An impressive 2.56m viewers watched MasterChef Australia: The Winner Announced last night.

The show had its biggest audience in Melbourne with 853,000 viewers, ahead of Sydney’s 761,000.

Another 2.33m watched MasterChef Australia: Finale Night and 1.81m watched the first portion of the contest, MasterChef Australia: Sunday.

But the 2.56m trails the figures for 2010 by a long shot, when it pulled 3.96m in preliminary figures.

It also means Australia’s Got Talent: The Winner Announced last week (2.85m in preliminary figures) eclipsed the cook-off.

But it was enough for TEN to dominate the night, with a 33.6% share, well in front of Nine (25.4%) and Seven (22.4%).

TEN Programming Chief David Mott, said: “MasterChef 2011 has been an outstanding broadcast and online success, commanding a significant and loyal following over 14 big weeks.

“Throughout this season, the show has delivered the kind of demographically targeted audiences that we have come to expect of the MasterChef franchise. Last night’s audience confirms that MasterChef Australia is the one of the most consistent and important formats on Australian television.”

Excluding News, the other strong result for the night was The Block which creatively coded its 90 minute episode into two: The Block: Room Winner Revealed (1.82m) and The Block: Sunday (1.43m) -let’s hope this isn’t a weekly tactic.

TEN’s brazen ploy to lure viewers into The Renovators saw it attract 1.26m viewers. While the network will defend it was its best result yet, it was also a switch-off for 550,000 viewers.

Seven’s best outside of News was Sunday Night on 1.14m and Midsomer Murders was ABC’s best on 1.1m.

Week 33.

35 Responses

  1. They are very good figures for MasterChef and indeed Ten. Regardless of last year and regardless of what people say, Masterchef is still a force to be rekkoned with. In saying that, I will confidently say that I think The Block will beat both AGT and Masterchef for its final.
    There is no specific reason behind this but I just have that feeling.

  3. Well, they won’t be celebrating a 1.4M drop in viewership from last year’s finale. That is a loss of almost one-third of the potential audience. Disastrous. Let the post-mortem begin, Shine really need to invigorate this brand as it is Ten’s flagship program, so much rides on it.

  4. In terms of people being over “the formula” of reality TV… I suspect it’s not just the viewers.

    Best line of the night goes to Gary on MasterChef who, when asked by Kate to “just tell me my score already!”, slowly replied in the drawn-out Reality TV Judge Announcement Voice™: “Kate… that’s not… how it works.”

    Guess if you’re trapped by the formula, you might as well have a little fun with it…

  5. I have to agree with Chasingvegas, the numbers for MC 3 were still excellent considering the watering down of the format by 7; two seasons of MKR since the MC 2. Don’t forget all the additional digital channels we now have available giving the viewing audience so many more choices and the natural drop off for the format – happens with all shows. Not to mention the slagging by other networks and production companies (wonder who that could be) including misinformation about ‘ratings slide’ which was a mere 15% from MC 2 to MC 3, not 30% as some were reporting. Good job Ten, Fremantle and all the hard working people who work on this show. Oh and yes, before attacking Ten any further please consider this: 7 & 9 would Never have gone out on limb and made a show like this. Hats off to David Mott and his team for taking chances.

  6. An interesting comment on the split episode scenario in the article on smh.com.au:

    “Ten didn’t want to talk to us about it. But they did point out a precedent for last night’s tactic: on April 27, 2009, the finale of Ten’s The Biggest Loser was split to help launch a new program, which went on to do rather well: MasterChef.”

    A few other thoughts:
    – With so many people sampling Renovators during the MC finale, and so many people talking about Renovators and the impact on the MC finale in the media today, will that mean an increase of people watching Renovators to find out what the fuss is all about?
    – If you consider that The Renovators is supposed to be on at 7:30 and has had to put up with 8:30 (ish) timeslots the past 2 weeks, maybe it was time for MC to give up and let the prime timeslot go?
    – Shouldn’t we be happy that the MC Finale started earlier this year? For those with a DVR it means being able to skip all the ad breaks! Previously it started at 7:30 and finished sometime after 9:30 (so much for all those parents complaining about the late finish – it finishes at the same time every year!)

  10. 1,810,+ / (1,269,+) / 2,234,+ / 2, 568,+
    Seeing that S3 had it’s prolems TEN is probably pretty happy with those no.s. Not to say a re-think for S4 isn’t in order, seeing S3 was a drop from S2. I don’t see a problem with taking the chance of including The Renovators in the mix. Switch-offs was the name of the game at 7.30 for all main 3 Channels anyway, TEN’s drop-off at least came back stronger unlike the others did, who just continued to drop off and off for the night.

    I don’t put as much importance on the difference between AGT and MC no.s, one is a once a week Variey show, and the other is a 6 nights a week Cooking show.

  11. Huge drop on try-hard Masterchef. Audience is over their conrtrived formulae – this majorly apparent in The Renovators.
    Audiences also appreciating that MKR is the better cooking show – MKR rating were testament to this – considering daily light savings and summer viewing – MKR really outrated Masterw*nk this year.
    Its a slippery slope for masterchef from hereon forward – the brand has been tarnished by a non-eventful 3rd series.

  12. I don’t know why people are critising ch9. They got an audience of 1.82 Million for The Block on a night that ch10 should have dominated. Well done ch9

  14. If The Renovators were to debut at 6:30pm tonight, I think the ratings will be okay. Masterchef should’ve gone from 7:30-9:30pm. Then again, this season was kinda predictable. The Renovators isn’t that bad, it’s just the format was reused and the timing was not right + the targeting audience was all wrong. I think Ten will try to boost The Renovators ratings by placing shows like Modern Family before it. We see how it goes.

  15. A wonderful tweet from Tony Martin today –
    When Ten sacked all those people in the newsroom, they made them sit through a whole ‘Renovators’ before announcing who’d be going.

  16. We needed a reno break after long drawn out MC final.
    Hopefully it will give reno a boost.Great rooms last night to keep people coming back
    well done kate

  17. That Block coding is a joke and screams of desperation. Everyone knows it’s only used for Final episodes.
    Imagine if Masterchef had split every episode as ‘evicted’ or ‘cook off winner’. There’d be no room in the top 10 for anything else.

  18. I thought it was perfect for MC to be split, having Renovators in the middle gave you a break and so MC didn’t feel like overkill. In the end 2.5m is a very strong result considering the ratings for MC have been down on previous years due to Ch7 watering down the format with the ridiculous MKR. Also, it worked for 10 with the Renovators seeing a lift in ratings so hopefully those few thousand extra viewers will stick with it. Renovators is so much better than the Block & that other Jamie Durie show, is that even still showing?

  23. How desperate are Nine coding The Block like that when it still has 2 weeks to run? I thought there must have been a vague industry standard only to do winner announced on show finals but I guess not.

  24. Oh dear… I guess TEN will have to live and learn.

    All eyes on Shine to fix the damage done to MC this year and I guess no xmas bonus for the dill at TEN programming who thought it wise to smack The Renovators in the middle..

  25. Massive fail in terms of the Renovators ploy. That’s only marginally more viewers than it would get on any other night and it obviously a) annoyed the hell out of a lot of viewers and b) impacted on the numbers watching the MC winner announcement

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