Nine’s Footy Show made a rare return to the top twenty Thursday night TV shows as veteran commentator Sam Newman gave an emotional farewell to the program and viewers tuned in ahead of the weekend’s Preliminary AFL and NRL finals
Despite making the top twenty TV shows with 373,000 metro viewers, Nine’s footy show still trailed Seven’s rival AFL program, The Front Bar which attracted an audience of 407,000 across the five major cities.
In Melbourne, The Footy Show had 170,000 viewers to The Front Bar’s 278,000.

Nine’s troubled AFL Footy Show saw stalwart Sam Newman give a tearful farewell
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The Bachelor was the night’s top rating entertainment program with 882,000 metro viewers, Ten also had 735,000 viewers tune in for Gogglebox. Seven’s The Chase Australia and Home and Away attracted 553,000 and 545,000 to make the top ten shows for the evening.
Seven’s News was the overall most watched show for the night with 954,000 metro viewers.
Ten also dominated the evening’s demographics with The Bachelor, Gogglebox and The Project being the top ten shows across the 16-39, 18-49 and 25-54 groups.
In main channel share, Ten took the greatest audience share for the evening with 18.9%, just ahead of Seven’s 18.8% and Nine’s 16.6%.
Seven however won the evening’s network share with 28.6% of total audience, ahead of Nine’s 24.2% and Ten 23.5%. The ABC recorded 15.7% network share and SBS 8%.