Secrets and Lies drops to 278,000, Adam Boland’s story gets 755,000
Ten’s audience continued to decline for its prized whodunnit series Secrets and Lies with its ratings dropping to 278,000, according to OzTam.
Secrets and Lies lost around 40,000 viewers from last week to fall 40th in all programs and fourth in the 8.30pm timeslot, its lowest numbers of the series so far, struggling against The Block and Love Child on Nine, and My Kitchen Rules and Revenge on Seven.
Meanwhile SBS launched the second series of American drama Vikings to 240,000 at .30pm, as Love Child stole the timeslot with 1.166m metro viewers on Channel Nine at 9.03pm. Seven was second in the timeslot with 921,000 for its US import Revenge from 9pm to 10pm.
ABC1’s Australian Story feature on morning television producer Adam Boland, who opened up about his experience of bi-polar and launching the Channel Ten breakfast show Wake Up, was third in the timeslot with 755,000 at 8pm.
There are several major problems with Secrets & Lies:
The whole cross media thingy is wrong for a show whose demographic is middle-aged people. If the show were aimed at 15 years olds then the strategy might have worked.
The story itself is wafer-thin. Each episode is anchored around one measly plot point (which you can see a mile off). Everything else that happens is padding which makes Bikie Wars look action-packed. A good murder mystery uses every scene to explore multiple suspects and numerous clues, whether they be real clues or misdirection. One “clue” per episode is just lame.
Although it looks good, there’s a really annoying sound track which uses Brooding Scary Foreboding Music all the time. Save the scary music for when it’s needed.
The cops are Inexplicably Evil Central Casting types.
None of the characters are fleshed out in any way. Even the main character is one-dimensional (I’m being generous).
The overall tone is basically silly and soapy. The neighbour is a child molester who just conveniently happens to have a box full of kiddie pics in his roofspace? C’mon. It turns out that everyone is sleeping with everyone else? The whole thing looks like an M-rated episode of Neighbours.
If only Adam’s breakfast TV show could get 10% of Australian Story’s numbers everyone would be smiling.
Good call on Secret and Lies Shane. Watching it last night I couldn’t put my finger on why it was so bad! Will probably watch the last two eps though (hang on, there’s still two left!?!?)
Vikings is a British series in conjunction with the Canadians.
In my opinion, the biggest problem with Secrets and Lies is that it was advertised as an intriguing and mysterious “whodunit” where multiple people could be the culprit and we (the audience) had to search for clues within each episode in order to uncover the true killer.
Instead, we got a slow-moving soap opera with dull, emotionless characters who wandered aimlessly around every episode, while the police and media harassed the main character even though he has no motive AND was the guy who found the body to begin with.
It’s just……painfully bland.