TEN’s failure to launch as Nine takes Monday
Ratings: Secrets and Lies is punished by Nine's Love Child as the network struggles to launch new brands.
- Published by David Knox
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Network TEN is now suffering from a chronic case of a failure to launch new shows.
Promising new drama Secrets and Lies last night, which has the marketing hype of a US adaptation in the pipeline, launched to 404,000 viewers. It’s a shame given the content is very good.
It was punished by another local drama, Nine’s Love Child at 1.17m. Even The Bold and the Beautiful pulled more numbers in the afternoon. Rival networks counter-programmed with reality shows strategically running well into the night.
But the numbers follows a disappointing launch for So You Think You Can Dance Australia.
Together with the Academy Awards, Nine’s evening share was strong enough to win the night.
Nine won with 34.1% share then Seven 31.3%, ABC 18.1%, TEN 13.4% and SBS just 3%.
Nine News (1.24m / 1.18m) was best for Nine followed by The Block (1.2m), Love Child (1.17m), A Current Affair (1.08m), Hot Seat (655,000) and the Academy Awards (560,000 rpt / 506,000 Live).
My Kitchen Rules topped the night with 1.7m viewers for Seven then Seven News (1.15m / 1.1m), Revenge (855,000), Home and Away (853,000), Million Dollar Minute (476,000) and How I Met Your Mother (414,000).
ABC News (893,000) led for ABC1 followed by Australian Story (807,000), 7:30 (745,000), Media Watch (621,000), Four Corners (604,000) and Q & A (464,000).
TEN Eyewitness News (596,000) was the best the network could manage then The Project (534,000 / 338,000), Modern Family (473,000), The Bold and the Beautiful (418,000), Secrets and Lies (404,000) and Bondi Rescue (344,000).
SBS also had a terrible Monday. Stephen Hawking’s Future Universe was their best at just 144,000 viewers. Next were World News Australia (127,000), a Housos repeat (122,000) and Idris Elba: King of Speed (97,000).
Ben and Holly’s Little Kingdom on ABC2 again topped multichannels at 287,000.
Sunrise: 323,000
Today: 286,000
ABC News Breakfast: 41,000 / 36,000
Wake Up: 23,000
OzTAM Overnights: Monday 3 March 2014
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- Tagged with 7:30, A Current Affair, ABC News, ABC News Breakfast, Academy Awards, Australian Story, Ben and Holly's Little Kingdom, Bondi Rescue, Four Corners, Home and Away, Hot Seat, Houso's, How I Met Your Mother, Idris Elba: King Of Speed, Love Child, Media Watch, Million Dollar Minute, Modern Family, My Kitchen Rules, Nine News, Q&A, Revenge, Secrets and Lies, Seven News, So You Think You Can Dance Australia, Stephen Hawking’s Future Universe, Sunrise, TEN Eyewitness News, The Block, The Bold and the Beautiful, The Project, Today, Wake Up, World News Australia
61 Responses
If Ten have the Commonwealth Games then they better hope they have better luck launching stuff with that. But I guess I’ll just acknowledge most of the regular audience seem to be sheep. They watch a channel all night. So they need to get more of them. Don’t know if it is possible.
As for SBS I won’t be surprised if some of their problems is the stupid frequency changes they had to do this year. I suspect they are losing a lot of the audience because they can’t get it anymore and don’t know how to regain it. Plus as stated previously they so messed up their signal for a month in Melbourne my antenna couldn’t get them. Who knows if it is true elsewhere.
Sercrets amd lies is such a brilliant show. Can not understand the low ratings . Ten has serious problems with selling itself to viewers. Its needs a major marketing campaign to rebrand itself . If secrets and lies was on nine or seven it would get over one million viewers.its a shame people are not watching ten.studio ten, the project there are some top shows on ten.i think its all those years of selling itself as a teen station .
There needs to be some kind of connection between Ten and it’s viewers, I don’t know what that is but we need to feel like Ten is apart of us/one of us.
50 comments and rising, should be enough to demonstrate to any normal exec. that many of us still care about the need for a viable alternative to the bully boys of the FTA channels.
FTA is all many of us can afford, but this does not mean we should accept what ever a network wants to dish up, when ever ‘they choose to do so’, not every one has multiple recorders, and possible many only have the ‘cheapest/basic’ rip off subsidized digital set top boxes, supplied and charged to the max subsidized allowable $$, by some ACMA/Digital Ready Authorized Antenna Installers.
Many comment that they cannot understand why Network Ten can not even attract viewers to what are obviously some very good new or proven shows, to me it seems that Ten might be trying to do some thing that requires the credibility they’ve lost lost over recent years.
” When you say ‘You spoke We listened’ you…
@LizzieMay and Jimbo Jones yes agree with the assessment however I continue to direct my criticism at drama network execs rather than the producers. Why was this series rushed into production when the scripts are so undercooked? Networks take script approval rights as a matter of course and put their names on the shows as EPs. It was then (ominously) shelved until this year and then thrown under the Monday night bus. Geez.
Omg Ten is totally stuffed! I think it’s time to fire some people.
Oddly enough I was looking forward to S&L, but completely forgot it was on last night. Instead had MKR on in the background as I did some work, and then watched Revenge whilst thinking how monotonous the plot has become and I wish there was better TV on. Ooops! But I think this is an example of how I just wasn’t reminded, as I hardly watch Ten anymore. Isn’t their biggest problem that they want to take everything on? They tried competing their news at 6pm last year, Master Chef against MKR, Dance against two other reality juggernauts . . . .when will they learn! They should be finding gaps in the schedule and offering alternative viewing, not taking everything on. Go back to business basics, Ten!
HardcorePrawn and emailprotected…..laying the blame of ch10s problems at the feet of Andrew Bolt is at best laughable and at worst somewhat deranged. How can a miniscule sunday show by a bloke who only preaches to the converted, drag a whole network down….really?
ch10 are being squeezed into oblivion by ch7and9, only big money over a sustained period of time will bring them back
I wanted to watch secret and lies but revenge is the choice for me. I have taped the 3 episodes of love child and havent watched on yet. But better start soon.
By the way does anyone know why ch9 arent showing a new ep of the big bang theory tonight?
@Lizzie May – I agree wholeheartedly about the repetition and thinness.
This is what happened in the first episode of Broadchurch – 20 characters are introducted, including the whole family of the victim, and those characters’ relationships with each other are established. The police are introduced, including the conflict which makes their relationship interesting. The local journo discovers the victim’s identity and leaks it, thereby causing a line of conflict to develop with the cops. Several suspects are shown to have been in a position to have committed the crime. Clues from the autopsy and crime scene point to foul play. The family go through the grieving process.
Broadchurch is a masterclass in how to set up characters and the world they live in, which is what makes the audience want to keep watching. Secrets & Lies does not do this.
I think there’s more pain to come for C10 and S&L next week with even more disastrous numbers…
Sure it was a competitive time slot and no-one’s watching the network anyway but that pilot was very flawed. It repeated itself endlessly and the plot and story were very thin. Jumped into the story and asked us to care about the protagonist without much intro information. Sorry, I wanted to enjoy it, but l didn’t.
It angers me that both 7 and 9 deliberately extended their reality crap until 9, knowing that viewers are so entrenched with their show they will not remember to switch over.
I only watch two existing dramas on Ch7 and Ellen on Gem.
Ch10 is included for some shows and ABC gets me for most of the week with excellent dramas and the like from Wed to Sun.
Congrats Ch10 on always providing new and exciting content!
@Panda – Ten did have the Winter Olympics recently, which rated well despite their oft-criticised coverage. They marketed a lot of their upcoming shows during the games.
I think that [email protected] has a point: giving increased airtime to such a divisive character as Andrew Bolt will drive viewers away.
If Ten were to partner him with someone equally outspoken but who usually holds a differing opinion (similar to how 7 often pair Mark Latham and Jeff Kennett) then they might repair some of the damage that he’s done; but to have him proselytising like an Antipodean version of V for Vendetta’s Lewis Prothero is just bad business sense.
Recorded S & L and Revenge and watched delayed Oscars. Have given up on Love Child. Probably nothing wrong with it but something has to give. Really looking forward to S & L because of the actors but if the reports of looking online for clues etc is true, they will lose me quickly – I just want to watch a show on TV, not check online for something I may have missed.
It’s designed so you can sit back and watch, or you can sit forward and play detective online. Very deliberate for the reasons you have mentioned below.
Should have been scheduled for 8.30 Thursday.
Another problem for TEN at the moment is they’ve got no regular viewers watching the channel. It’s very hard to launch a big drama when a small audience sees the launch campaign in the first place.
They desperately need 1m strip show as a launching pad.
Agree with many on this post. TEN should have shifted once they realised LC was launching in same time-slot two weeks before & establishing itself (very successfully) with a similar audience. A huge marketing spend and excellent publicity & promo-ing can’t make up for the fact that the boat had been missed.
Bolt is the least of 10’s problems which begin at 6pm and continue into the Project which is basically Fox news with an aussie spin (very off putting)
Eat, sleep, rinse, repeat – Ten
I cannot comment on S and L as I never watched it. It does get extremely boring hearing what awesome shows are on 10 and how they should rate better and so on and so forth, yet they keep on going out backwards. As mentioned by others previously, the acting in many of Aussie shows at best appears to be generally mediocre to barely passable. Maybe it’s our accent.The problem is and has always been bad plots and atrocious scripts.
Many refuse to watch locally produced drama because of this. Now that Puberty Blues has gone past the original novel, you can bet your boots the standard of writing will deteriorate.
IMHO there has only been two local shows that were an exception to the rule and that was Nines Halifax series years ago and the ABC’s Grass Roots.
Such a shame but Ten knew what they were up against. Australian dramas shouldn’t be scheduled against each other so often. The networks should work together to some extent to keep the industry viable. Australian content is the future of free tv. It’s the only thing we can’t get elsewhere.
Monday is Walking Dead and True Detective night for me. There’s no way I’d watch Secrets and Lies with Ads. I’ll watch it tonight or tomorrow. Interesting that a repeat of Spicks and Specks (the old one) on ABC2 got 250k while the new one gets under 500k.
I think Spicks and Specks time in it’s current time slot will be limited if it doesn’t improve substantially.
I was eagerly anticipating the debut of Secrets & Lies, and i was not disappointed. Set the scene, establish the characters, and let little clues be revealed gradually.
It’s a pity that the two ‘bitch-fest’ shows over at Ch. Kochie (Seven) and Ch. Eddie (Nine) ran over time (upwards of half an hour i hear) as people don’t know what they are missing out on…quality Australian drama. Relentless promotion during the summer on the Cricket and Winter Olympics coverage and it has come to naught.
You have to wonder whether Channel Ten should have even bothered switching on this year. Save for the Cricket, the Winter Olympics and the upcoming Commonwealth Games, they have been absolutely poleaxed in the ratings by the other two (Seven and Nine).
Can the ratings year be salvaged…highly doubtful.
Lots of discussion on this today, showing people still care for TEN’s situation and most enjoyed S&L. These are the take-away positives.
On another note, MKR and The Block didn’t appear to run overtime, they were scheduled to run longer (although The Block started late). As far as I can tell S&L was locked into Mondays before LC began. I know this because I saw the date some weeks ago. But it is fair to argue whether TEN should have reset it once they knew the lay of the land. The truth is we have Aussie dramas 6 nights a week at 8:30 now. It’s going to go head to head somewhere unless it is moved to 9:30.
I feel for TEN, but saying that I was looking forward to Secrets and Lies but it seemed to me at least to be going nowhere. Also why put it up against a couple of shows that you know have commenced and people are always going to stick with something that they have invested time in, rather than a new show. Put it on later in the year when Revenge and Love Child are at the end. Do not put on on Thursdays as Janet King is there. Hold off for a little while.
Nine’s “secrets and lies” commercials for Love Child, presumably designed to confuse people, were in very poor taste –
youtube.com/watch?v=780pLA1UGVI
Is it a case of too much watchable tv at one time? Personally, i’m usually taping one program while watching another while knowing i have a backlog of others to catch up on.
It is a shame S&L was slaughtered in the ratings. It was a remarkably good pilot episode, guess not too many people watched Ch10 to begin with…
I agree with a both sides of the Secrets & Lies debates. There definitely was a lack of other suspects, and lack of evidence in general to suggest anything from a murder, and even to point to a suspect. I understand that there is a rich amount available online, however I’m hoping the show doesn’t rely on this online content to complete the experience, when really it should just add to the experience.
I’m hoping the show can improve and really cast out the speculation in coming episodes.