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Comedy is the new Thursday

Ratings: Peter Helliar's sitcom is off to a better start than any of 10's Pilot week shows. Q&A draws in curious viewers.

New comedy offerings from 10 and Seven are off to an optimistic start, especially given their timeslots.

Peter Helliar’s How to Stay Married was a promising episode and drew 508,000 in its 9pm timeslot. That figure is higher than any of the Pilot Week shows, all of which were under 400,00. It was also strong in the demos. Overall it was only beaten by Nine’s Paramedics from 8:30 on 561,000.

Nazeem Hussain’s Orange is the New Brown drew 422,000 in an 8:30 slot which Seven is calling a solid debut.

Viewers swarmed to the Q&A special with Malcolm Turnbull at 666,000 (!) from 8pm as the top non-news offering of the night. It outranked The Bachelorette at 605,000 although it still topped the demos. 7:30, Home and Away (from 7pm) & RBT followed.

Seven News, ABC News & The Chase won early slots.

Nine won the primary channel share but Seven network won Thursday with 27.6% then Nine 27.2%, ABC 19.8%, 10 18.7% and SBS 6.7%.

Seven News was #1 with 850,000 / 823,000 then Home and Away (513,000), Orange is the New Brown (422,000), The Chase (414,000 / 109,000), Modern Family (274,000) and movie: Bridesmaids (157,000).

Nine News was best for Nine at 768,000 / 730,000 then A Current Affair (644,000), Paramedics (561,000), RBT (429,000), Hot Seat (404,000 / 272,000), Chicago Med (259,000) and Driving Test (205,000 in 2 cities),

ABC News (667,000), Q&A (666,000), 7:30 (594,000), Endeavour (295,000) and Sammy J (234,000) comprised ABC’s night.

The Bachelorette drew 605,000 or TEN followed by How to Stay Married (508,000), The Project (429,000 / 252,000) and 10 News First (335,000). Law & Order: SVU was 217,000. Pointless was just 192,000.

On SBS it was The Secret Life of Queen Victoria (202,000), SBS World News (137,000), War & Peace (111,000) and 24 Hours in Police Custody (110,000).

Peppa Pig pounced on multichannels at 190,000.

OzTAM Overnights: Thursday 8 November 2018.

17 Responses

  1. Many on here bag Tens pilot week but one must give them a big tick for trying new shows and HTSM is another example. Their new logo n general feel is heading in the right direction. Just need to work on that 6 to 7pm time slot.

  2. Liked how to stay married, thought orange is the new brown not funny. Has great people in it like Claudia, Kat and Ursula but still, switched off half way through.

    1. Thank you. I unfortunately sat through all of OITNB and i didn’t laugh once. It was just awful. It shocks me when I read that people thought it hillarious.

  3. How To Stay Married…liked the promos but with no info coming from Ten…I plain forgot….
    TV was on 2nd screen…which is mostly is for me unless something really grabs my attention…vaguely remember sort of watching Chicago Med

  4. HTSM was alright I thought but no Rosehaven. It was in the same vein as that amiable comedy. I’ll keep watching ‘cos it certainly has potential. I missed OITNB but will definitely catch it if only to see Urzilla as Nicole. The promos were really good.

  5. Unfortunately found How To Stay Married pretty weak.
    Dave O’Neill’s pilot, “Dave” in a similar vein, was much better.
    But will give HTSM another chance before I write it off.
    Have yet to watch Orange is the New Brown – sounds like the better of the two…

  6. I’ve heard a few people liking HTSM today, I wanted to recored but was recording something else, and I know TEN will Encore it somewhere (ATM it looks like a 9:30pm Monday potential), which is a problem for TENS shows trying to get big numbers on first viewing as theres usually so many Encores.
    Not a H&A viewer but I feel sad for the show on those numbers, you just know next year theres gonna be even more rumours about its slot on 7. A plus at least is it’s online viewers have creeped up to 70k viewers more consistently.
    Peach reverting back to its similar line up of a few weeks ago sees no change again. I honestly believe a youthful 6pm drama into Neighbours could be beneficial (Hollyoaks/E4 shows/BBC 3 online/CW Dramas shows stripped). While I hate the 10Peach name it’s promos for shows at least look a bit slicker.

    1. H&A was well over 600,000 Mon, Tue & Wed. Up to 640,000. Last night was the usual 3-eps coded as one, affected by Malcolm at 8 and Bachelorette taking some. No way will H&A move or be dropped. 10 already has one 30-min “TBA” slot 9:30 Mon to repeat HTSM but expect them to find more spaces to repeat and repeat.

      1. well I don’t really want to get into a petty numbers game of whats “well over 600k”, but Wednesday was 604k, 620k on Monday. I don’t think it’s going anywhere just yet myself, especially not until 7 fills in some other gaps, it can’t risk losing the younger eyes the show has switching on at 7pm, however with a 300k switch off at 7pm and the news staying ahead in demos isn’t good as it at least used to be a bit more demo friendly.

        Also looking back at H&A ratings a month ago (with +28) all 3 episodes pretty much rated the same with the added competition at 7:30pm not really making any difference.

    2. As for Neighbours lead-in even re-runs of hit 90s dramas have appeal, still not sure why they yanked 90210 reruns off after 6 months, thought that had got traction

      They really need to be a acquiring a library of fresh titles for both Boss and Peach to keep them releavant in the early evenings

  7. I agree. Found orange is the new brown hilarious and laughed at most of it.
    Did not find how to stay married funny at all but did last out the full episode so I could watch SVU.

  8. Sigrid Thornton and the Skeleton had us in fits of laughter, as did Nicole Kidman (Urzila) and Chris Hemsworth (Nazeem) in a fight scene.

    Peter Helliar and Lisa McCune had us reaching for the remote at the first ad break, I thought it was supposed to be a comedy.

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