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Handmaid’s Tale lifts SBS, Seven wins Thursday.

Ratings: MKR tops the night at 1.07m viewers. Footy Show loses to Front Bar in Melbourne.

Fast-tracked new episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale saw SBS share lift last night.

Last Thursday SBS had a share of 7.1%. Last night it increased to 9.2%.

The drama averaged 270,000 viewers over the two episodes -if SBS had coded each separately as commercial networks do, no doubt it would be higher. The episode was also available at SBS On Demand meaning many fans would have ignored the linear broadcast.

My Kitchen Rules again topped the night at 1.07m viewers ahead of 7:30, NRL and Show Me the Movie. TEN’s panel show dipped from 423,000 to 353,000 last night due to the extra MKR competition this week.

Nine’s Footy Show combo was 396,000 across both editions, but crucially the AFL edition in Melbourne (152,000) lost out to The Front Bar (170,000) in that market.

Wentworth is now underperforming on ABC at just 155,000 viewers -most fans have doubtless seen the series.

Seven News, ACA (just) and The Chase were timeslot winners.

Seven network won Thursday with 33.8% then Nine 26.5%, TEN 16.2%, ABC 14.2% and SBS 9.2%.

My Kitchen Rules was #1 with 1.07m then Seven News (984,000 / 971,000), Home and Away (680,000), The Chase (608,000 / 402,000) and The Front Bar (265,000). First Dates UK was 137,000 in 2 cities.

Nine News (908,000 / 889,000) led for Nine followed by A Current Affair (762,000), Hot Seat (455,000 / 277,000), Thursday NRL (431,000), and The Footy Show (396,000).

The Project (435,000 / 333,000) was best on TEN then TEN Eyewitness News (435,000), Show Me the Movie (353,000), Family Feud (326,000) and Law and Order: SVU (291,000).

ABC News (733,000), 7:30 (517,000), Kiri (387,000), Sammy J (304,000), Think Tank (202,000) and Wentworth (155,000) comprised ABC’s night.

On SBS it was Great British Railway Journeys (299,000), The Handmaid’s Tale (270,000), Luke Nguyen’s Food Trail (200,000) and SBS World News (137,000).

Peppa Pig topped multichannels with 203,000.

OzTAM Overnights: Thursday 26 April 2018

22 Responses

  1. A strange decision by ABC to put ‘Wentworth’ on in a prime time slot given its age and previous exposure, but then they don’t have the option of putting drama on a secondary channel currently due to their own poor decisions like the need to show ‘Free Agents’ on 22 (a 9 year old failed series).

    1. Wentworth should have had a second look deal from the start, same as Place To Call Home.
      Let Foxtel have the premiere rights, let the DVD/VOD do its job and then onsell to TEN for example, perhaps a year later.
      With all the different platforms for viewing these days, it gets very expensive very fast if you’re only interested in a few shows.

      1. SBS has been pushing for second window of Foxtel shows where they have Screen Aus funding. Foxtel has always taken the view the exclusivity drives their subs. They maintained these shows would never be on FTA. Things change.

        1. I followed that story, and find myself on the side of SBS. ScreenAus is funded by taxpayers, so why should we have to pay a third party service to view the results?
          If what I think you are saying (these shows wouldn’t get made without Foxtel’s involvement) is true, then it can be proven that it’s incorrect.
          An example would be Janet King, which has funding but has never been driven by ratings or “subscribers”. It would make an interesting longform article, by the way, when you get all that spare time.

  2. If SBS coded The Handmaid’s Tale episodes separately, the first episode would have been and the second lower by an equivalent amount [And the peak figure will be higher still, but 270k is the average who watched for 2 hours]. 33k/19k have watched the first two eps on On Demand (as of this morning). This is down from the S1 premiere which rated around 400k (ON + 28 VPM). There will also be timeshifted viewing, but we are unlikely to see those because it won’t make the top 20 shows for Wed.

  3. The double episode of Handmaid’s Tale was brilliant last night.It’s a shame about the ratings for Wentworth though.Even though the episodes are five years old,i still feel it deserves a much bigger audience than that.

    1. I guess that depends on how much you enjoy watching women being brutally tortured. I fast forwarded through to the end of the ep because it wasn’t relevant to the plot and they’ve already done it many times before in S1. And I’m still trying to figure why a maternity hospital deals in animal carcasses. Haven’t looked at #2 yet, put TGF on instead.

      1. And a sport forum website said that The Front Bar also won Adelaide and Perth (on a combined basis). So deservedly credited/praised, especially when you consider The Footy Show’s heritage, size and expense (including multiple presenter changes of late).

  4. Wentworth with 155,000.
    That’s more than watched the series when firsr run on Foxtel several years ago. Most households do not have pay-TV so this result is not surprising.

  5. The first two episodes of Handmaid’s Tale Series 2 did not disappoint ….really looking forward to the remainder of the series. Think you may be correct David, most of the fans of the show did not wait around for it to show on FTA.

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