Saturday, December 6, 2008

Ten: What Went Wrong?


I can really only think of one medium threat ten has for 2009... So You Think You Can Dance. Yep. That's it. Of course, there are also other shows that do OK, like NCIS, Rove, Good News Week and Rush, but none of them are great, like some shows on other networks, ie. Packed to the Rafters, Underbelly, etc.

Ten has been infamous, of late, for shuffling programs around, axing them and taking them out of schedule, frustrating viewers to no end. To name a few, 90210 was recently brought back for one week, and now has vanished without a trace (even though they have a HD channel). The 7:00 timeslot has been shuffled from Taken Out to repeats of Friends to repeats of Will and Grace and back to Friends. The Bold and the Beautiful has been pushed into prime-time, frustrating some people who prefer it in the afternoon (AdelaideNow). Ten has to realise that this builds up resentment against the network, and cannot expect people to come back for new shows if they are not happy with the way they are treating old favourites... They especially do not need this resentment when they have lost their highest rating Australian show in a long time.

It can be argued that this resentment is beginning to show, with Ten's once most popular show House, severely weakened- all of its recent new episodes but one failed to crack the 1m mark. Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader was also weakened, as was Rove. Ten's attempts to revive the Sitcom failed in Back to You and Rules of Engagement. The embarrasing Download was axed as viewers realised that there's this new website that everyone's talking about called "YouTV or TubeMe or something".

All I have to say is that ten has a long way to go to claw itself back to where it was at the end of 2007.

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