Viewers curb their enthusiasm for Nine’s scheduling ploys
Nine’s out-of-sequence airing of a signle epsiode of Curb Your Enthusiasm on Tuesday – because it featured a reunuion of the cast of Seinfeld – rated an average audience of 755,000.
The show – the third episode of the seventh series of Curb Your Enthusiasm – had generated publicity in the US because it featured a fictional revival of the popular Seinfeld comedy. Curb Your Enthusiasm is an improvsed version of former Seinfeld writer Larry David’s downbeat Hollywood life.
Nine is currently showing the sixth series of Curb Your Enthusiasm on its digital channel Go.
The show was followed by the new series of Aussie Ladette To Lady which rated 693,000. In the same time slot, Seven’s All Saints rated just over 1m, while Ten’s Lie To Me pulled in just under 1m.
Nine finished the night with a previously unaired episode of the cancelled show Moonlight, which it told viewers was the second series. In fact the show was cancelled before it had a second series and last night’s episode was the ninth of the first series.
The network finished Tuesday night in third place, behind Seven and Ten.
Seven easily won the night with Packed To The Rafters rating 1.7m, according to preliminary figures from OzTam.
Tuesday night’s share:
- Seven: 31.5
- Ten: 23.4
- Nine: 23.0
- ABC1: 13.2
- SBS1 4.0
- GO!: 2.6
- ABC2: 1.3
- One HD: 1.0
- SBS2: 0.2
Tuesday’s top 15 shows:
- Packed to the Rafters Seven 1.7m
- RSPCA Animal Rescue Seven 1.4m
- NCIS Ten 1.3m
- Seven News Seven 1.3m
- Today Tonight Seven 1.3m
- Last Chance Surgery Seven 1.3m
- Two and a Half Men – 7:00pm Nine 1.2m
- 20 to 1 Nine 1.1m
- Home and Away Seven 1.1m
- A Current Affair Nine 1.1m
- All Saints Seven 1m
- The Simpsons 8pm Ten 1m
- Nine News Nine 0.997m
- Lie to Me Ten 0.955m
- The Simpsons 7:30pm Ten 0.925m
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i hate the way they marketed this episode as a seinfeld reunion and backward arsed the fact its an ep of curb your enthusiasm.
HeyHey 9, show the f#cking actual multiple series’ of Curb Your Enthusiasm, in f#cking order, on the same f#cking day, each f#cking week, and we may watch.
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I think TV schedulers must live in some kind of vacuum with no idea of what’s going on. The Seinfeld reunion is actually part of the Season arc for Curb this season and will be ongoing.
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Nine would actually be in a better position if they stopped making promos all together…
Last night they eroded just that little bit more of public trust with the lie that they were showing a Seinfeld reunion episode. Anyone tuning into Curb Your Enthusiasm for the first time would be scratching their heads wondering who the “other” bald guy was… and why he wasn’t funny.
The promo department’s “Jedi-mind-tricks” don’t work any more – “All new!”, “new series!”, “smash hit!”, et al just fall on the deaf ears of their increasingly shrinking audience.
The answer is to stop making promos (!) and to think about the audience – stop lying to your customers and “be the ball”.
The thing about eroding your base is that eventually you fall over – and that day isn’t that far away…
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Yeah Channel 9 dropped the ball on really building this one up, like MsJacobs said, its going to be ongoing, this episode clearly has ALOT of changes since the previous episodes (and seasons) that havent aired. Thats showing no loyalty to the fans to fasttrack just one episode of a show because its got all the Seinfeld cast in it.
Okey lets say channel 7 became this desperate and they just made an episode of Packed to the Rafters 😛 but its special guest was…lets just say for now they had the cast of Cheers or something turn up (a bit far fetched but eh!)
7 wouldn’t go out of sequence of the show just to get the short term attention for the sake of a quick ratings spike, that is unless 9’s strategy was to beat tv show downloaders in which case no local network can win against consistently.
More research Ch9 and maaaaybe you’ll squeeze a few more thousand viewers back from these godawful decisions such as this….
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The more the networks exploit their auds trust, the more auds will turn to downloading/pirating series. Neither the networks nor the talent benefit from this.
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Damn, I hate channel 9. They proved themselves worse than 10, with its 2 announcer ads that are SO damn annoying. Who thought it would be clever. I am so close to giving up on watching commercial tv. It is just not worth it to me.
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Yep, we’re all stupid and don’t mind this crap attempt at scheduling. Hmpphhh.
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Nine couldn’t pull off a decent launch if their life depended on it. Underbelly’s bought them a bit more time and they’re going to flog that to death as a result. I stopped watching commercial terrestrial television a long time ago due to it running ten minutes behind it’s advertised scheduling, falling out of synch with every other channel and having PVR/IQ recording issues as a result.
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this was pretty poor by nine – this was not a seinfeld reunion in any sense.
it was a comedy show with the actors playing bit parts as themselves as a side story to the main plot of larry david being more neurotic than the lot of them.
i would hazard a guess a heap of seinfeld viewers wouldn’t know who larry david is, nor would they find his humour funny.
great episode, and amazing series, but completely false advertising by nine here, and you can be sure if they ran with a 2 and a 1/2 men repeat at 9 they would have had a much stronger audience to roll into ladette to lady than what curb brought them.
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