Farmer Wants A Wife is Nine’s latest slow starter
Nine’s struggle to deliver ratings for new shows and series returns continued on Monday night with even The Farmer Wants A Wife only able to pull in an audience of 1m.
The show is seen as one of Nine’s ratings bankers, with last year’s season finale pulling in an average audience of 1.7m.
But in recent weeks, the network has seen several poor debuts.
One Sunday night, Rescue Special Ops opened with just 1.1m people, despite being heavily promoted. Two episodes in, Australia’s Perfect Couple is yet to pull in more than 800,000. And Dance Your Ass Off also delivered only an 800,000 audience before being yanked off air after one show. Home Made, a reality renovation show, was also a disappointment, while news show This Afternoon was taken off after just three weeks.
Underbelly and Sea Patrol have been among Nine’s few reliable shows this year.
Last night’s poor showing for The Farmer Wants A Wife was partly down to some smart scheduling of a spoiler bySeven. Its documentary Miracle On The Hudson, about the plane that safely managed an emergency landing on the Hudson River, pulled in nearly 1.5m viewers, most watched show of the night.
The show was also not helped by inheriting a poor audience from Big Bang Theory, which delivered Nine only just over 1m, despite the preceding Two And A Half Men being Nine’s best show of the night with 1.4m.
It was also a bad night for Ten, with Are You Smarter than A Fifth Grader? doing only 900,000, and The 7PM Project continuing to struggle with just under 750,000. In Sydney, Ten finished behind The ABC.
Monday night’s TV share: Seven 30.1%; Nine 23.7%; Ten 19.8%; ABC 17.5%; SBS 9%.
Monday’s top TV shows:
- Seven News Seven 1.7m
- Today Tonight Seven 1.6m
- Miracle on the Hudson Seven 1.5m
- Two and a Half Men 7:30pm Nine 1.4m
- Home and Away Seven 1.4m
- Nine News Nine 1.3m
- A Current Affair Nine 1.2m
- Two and a Half Men 7:00pm Nine 1.2m
- ABC News ABC 1.1m
- The Big Bang Theory Nine 1m
- The Farmer Wants A Wife Nine 1m
- Good News Week Ten 1m
- Ten News Ten 1m
- Australian Story ABC 0.9m
- Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? Ten 0.9m
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large. He returned to Mumbrella as Publisher in January 2025
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The number of comments thus far just reflects the sort of interest this show brings. Like everything at nine, this show will eventually die a painful but quick death.
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Farmer may want a Wife, but the rest of Australia want something decent to watch.
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I thought it was great but then again I unashamedly LOVE trash TV and this was certainly that! Definitely clever scheduling by Seven and will be interesting to see what ratings it gets next week.
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I like farmer wants a wife,It’s nice to see true love happen,
not hate, killing . something nice for once
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