TV viewers reject Australia’s Perfect Couple for World’s Strictest Parents
Nine’s second evening in a row with a new reality format ended the same way that Dance Your Ass Off did the night before – with a sub-800,000 audience for Australia’s Perfect Couple on Wednesday night.
Despite inheriting an audience of just over 1.2m from Two And A Half Men, more than 400,000 turned over before the end of the Jules Lund-fronted Perfect Couple, which averaged 798,000 viewers, according to preliminary TV ratings from OzTam. It was the worst performing show on any channel before 9.30pm. The show featured couples living in a house together competing in games before voting on who to evict.
Meanwhile Nine’s failed programming experiment was Seven’s gain, with new series World’s Strictest Parents – on at the same time as Perfect Couple – rating more than 1.5m, a gain of about 300,000 on Home And Away which preceded it.
Over on Ten, interest waned in The 7Pm project, which fell from 1.3m on Monday to 1.1m on Tuesday to 874,000 on Wednesday night.
For Nine, Australia’s Perfect Couple was the only show that failed to perform. Afterwards, ratings picked up by a couple of hundred thousand for RPA and Cold Case. However, Seven still won the night, with a share of 27.6% to Nine’s 24.8%.
Ten was on 19.8%, only just ahead of The ABC which rated an evening metro share of 19.2%. This was driven by a strong operformance from Spicks And Specks and a slight improvement from The Chaser’s War On Everything. In Sydney, the ABC beat Ten into fourth place.
SBS rated 8.5%.
Wednesday’s top rating TV shows:
- Seven News Seven 1.6m
- World’s Strictest Parents Seven 1.5m
- Spicks and Specks ABC 1.4m
- A Current Affair Nine 1.3m
- Today Tonight Seven 1.3m
- Nine News Nine 1.3m
- Home and Away Seven 1.3m
- Two and a Half Men Nine 1.2m
- The Chaser’s War on Everything ABC 1.2m
- ABC News ABC 1.1m
- Criminal Minds Seven 1.1m
- The Simpsons 7.30pm Ten 1.1m
- The Simpsons 8pm Ten 1m
- Cold Case Nine 1m
- RPA Nine 1m
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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…and this is why Pay TV grows. The moronic crap that FTA (and particularly 9) keep pumping out is mind boggling. Who in the hell thought Dance Your Ass Off would be a good idea? And as for the selection of dull plastic people that they seem to have for Perfect Couple….Right. Glad I got that off my chest.
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I have a great idea for Channel 9s next reality show.
You put a bunch of Ch 9 producers into a room and ask them to come up with ideas for a new reality show.
When some bright spark says ‘How about Australia’s Perfect Couple’ Donald Trump can jump out of the closet and say “You’re fired”.
You can add a surprise element, a gun perhaps, so that when some terminally stupid person says, “How about another series of Big Brother?’ Donald can shoot them.
Or better still they can have their eyeballs super glued to the tv screen and be forced to watch Dance Your Ass Off.
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Well with FTA TV, you get what you pay for.
I wouldn’t want to associate with these people in real life why the hell would I want to see them on the TV? Think of some successful TV over the years. Frasier, Seinfield, Friends, The Simpson’s, Two and a Half men….etc And in Australia Hollow Men. Why? because they have one common theme. Ther’re creative, well scripted and acted, and not a hint of reality Tv in sight. Hint, invest in TV prople want to watch instead of “cost-effective” crap. I’d be pissed if I were an advertiser paying to be on air at the moment and if a TV sales exec came into my office sprouting the wonders of this new show and why I should advertise in this timeslot, unlikely they’d get anymore face time with me.
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Channel 9 are in a pretty good position. They could wipe the board clean – in every way – and start again from scratch and suddenly appear to be, will, kind of dynamic. Is there a single show or personality on Channel 9 that you actually like? Or think is of even minimum level of quality? I can’t think of any. Imagine if they announced that they were starting 2010 by totally cleaning the slate.
Dump all their current programming and fire everyone they currently have on air. NO-one would care, and it couldn’t get any worse for them. Couldn’t be worse than a stable of Richard Wilkins, A Current Affair, dancing fat chicks, endless 20-1 and stupid ‘tug on the heartstrings’ renovation rescue rubbish. Imagine if they actually funded great Australian programming, or put the decent US stuff they buy up on at a reasonable time. Imagine if they axed Current Affair and 60 Minutes and put on some real news programs. They’d leave 7 and 10 in the dust.
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Nine casts facile personalities in all of its shows. Its reality contestants look like models from swimwear catalogues, while its stable of so-called stars are made up of non-talents like Jules Lund. As long as Nine keeps rewarding mediocracy, it will continue to slip in the ratings.
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Who the hell would watch a show that supposedly is going to ACTUALLY find australias perfect couple…
cmon channel 9 come up with something better
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