Australia’s Perfect Couple stinks up Nine’s Wednesday ratings
Nine appears to have another reality contest turkey on its hands after the second week of Australia’s Perfect Couple saw its ratings sink lower.
The show’s audience fell from 798,000 viewers last week to 762,000 viewers on Wednesday night, according to preliminary ratings from OzTam.
It was beaten in its timeslot by Seven’s World’s Strictest Parents (1.6m); and Ten’s double episodes of the Simpsons (around 1m). The flop follows Nine’s dalliance with renovation contest Home Made and even more shortlived Dance Your Ass Off.
However, it wasn’t the only show giving programmers headaches. Ten’s The 7pm Project slumped to 701,000 – down on the previous night’s 786,000 and its second worst audience to date.
How many more years before the stations twig to the fact that the Australian public are done with having a mirror held up to themselves? They want to be taken away from their lives, the 9-5 hassle. Until then, Australia’s Top Bogan, Vols I – IV.
Nine use to be my channel of choice. As soon as I switched the box on, it would automaticaly go to nine, and nine times out of ten – thats where it would stay. Not just because they had some great programming, but because of their great culture of trust and reliability. They had that loyal following that other TV stations couldn’t even buy. But nine mistook my loyalty for gullibility. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, and i’ll dance my ass off to channel 7.
Putting aside personal tastes for a minute, from a purely commercial point of view it seems that all of the networks need to carry out more due diligence on understanding what kind of audience levels their programming will achieve prior to them being put to air.
So many of the programming decisions seem to be of the ‘hit and hope’ variety with nothing more than vague gut feel (& prayer) that what they put out there will actually stick with an audience.
For sure risks need to be taken but it just seems to me that with so much programming these days it is more miss than hit. Given the budgets we are talking about there are some huge and unsubstantiated gambles being made.
Matt, your observation is right on the money. I hope David Gyngell jumps on to this site when he’s alone in his office and no one is looking. He would cringe at your comment and say “Why didn’t I think of that??”
@Matt – BAM! There it is, as Salina mentioned your observation is right on the money!
What are you doing….. the perfect couple shown widethrough Australian TV ….to young and old….. as the perfect couple..
I don’ t care anymore….. the media are mad..
I can’t recall Nine doing any market research for anything… but they definitely seem to have lost the ability to produce anything an audience wants.
In this particular case no one actually sat down and asked the obvious question “why”. Why on Earth would you want to find Australia’s perfect couple – I couldn’t think of anything more nauseating! If Australia’s perfect couple came sat next to you in a restaurant you’d ask to move tables…
Here’s some more free advice to Nine execs – if the very idea of a show makes you want to vomit – even just a little bit – it’s not a good idea…