Australian Spartan yanked, returns later this month.
Updated: Big budget show fails to triumph for Seven, due to return in 2 weeks.
- Published by David Knox
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- Filed under Programming
Seven has yanked Australian Spartan from its schedule after just two episodes.
My Kitchen Rules returns to 7pm Sunday, followed by Sunday Night.
The move follows disappointing ratings for the big budget series, scoring just 524,000 viewers last night. It debuted a week ago with 816,000.
Updated: Seven has advised the show will return in two weeks, during Easter non-ratings.
Angus Ross Director of Programming said, “Despite the best efforts of a great team on both sides of the camera, the show has not done the job it needed to do in its current time slot.
“Australian Spartan will take a two week break, before finding its new home in the prime-time schedule, in line with the kick off 2018 AFL season.
“The series will return with fifteen teams entering the Spartan arena to compete in the Finals Deciders shows leading to the ultimate test of endurance, strength and teamwork and $150,000 in prize money.”
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- Tagged with Australian Spartan, My Kitchen Rules, Sunday Night
18 Responses
Interestingly, TVNZ2 in New Zealand are still playing episodes as scheduled (heat 3 is on now). If Seven doesn’t run double episodes, the Kiwis will know the results before us.
If you don’t rate, you don’t get screened.
Angus Ross – AFL does not “kick off”. It has a bounce! Similar to Australian Spartan I guess ?
did not take long to pull it out of 7pm sunday slot.
If this was on channel 10 it would b some what of a moderate success thou and gotten played to the end ? Funny that
Are they skipping straight to the final then?
Any idea what is replacing MKR that was originally scheduled for Thursday then? Or is my assumption of they’ve rolled MKR forward a day merely an assumption!?
It is TBA, probably Home & Away.
I hope it’s not a 2hr Home and away marathon again… they are 90 mins too long.
Gosh. Yanking it entirely seems very dramatic. I’d expected to it be shuffled if to maybe Thursday night. That said, it would die 1000 deaths against live NRL in Syd and Bne.
I wonder if Seven will have enough episodes of MKR to continue on Thursday as well?
That said, Seven beat Nine on multiple NRL Thursdays in recent years, even just with Home and Away marathon. Possibly 3 of 5 markets being AFL heartland may explain that.
Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays are usually Seven’s most dominant during Autumn/Winter.
Silly decision to schedule the premiere of it opposite Married At First Sight which was clearly surging and halfway through its season.
Someone in the 7 programming department was “too clever by half” with this spoiler tactic…launching Spartan earlier than expected and trying to one-up Ninja Warrior. While it is sad to see any Australian production do poorly with jobs at stake, it is not too disappointing to see such blatant copying go unrewarded with poor ratings. 7 should concentrate on something original.
Seven acts quickly. Nine laughing. However, I wonder if Nine has some concern about how big a failure Spartan was? Didn’t watch Spartan, so I can’t compare (like most of Aus), but reading feedback suggests that Ninja is more of a spectacle and is Simply a better production.
MKR was a show created directly to compete with the unbeatable MasterChef and it worked. House Rules to a certain extent was a rip-off of The Block and that has had success too. It is not uncommon for some “rip-offs” to work. One might even say Aust Ninja Warrior was similar to Gladiator. Spartan was just too rushed and too tacky.
Really upset that this is being moved… thought it was a fun watch
Such a shame. I really enjoyed it
Haven’t they got two series in the can already? This is actually disastrous for them. A little hilarious… but still, disastrous. That’s what you get when you do openly copy another network’s show I guess.