Why? well mostly because I hate all this reality TV crap

especially

"I am a celebrity get me out of here"
MKR
Married at first sight

All bloody nonsense shows imo!


Has the nation tired of watching the same thing on a different channel?
By Nathanael Cooper6 March 2018 — 4:59pm

There's a rule in Australian television programming.
If someone has a clever idea, steal it, then beat it to death until no one wants to watch it.

And it seems Australia is finally growing tired of watching the same old stuff rebadged on a different channel.

It used to be the case that programmers would jealously watch the ratings on rival networks then quickly fashion up their own version, put a new name on it, and watch their own ratings climb.

Australian Idol beget The X Factor. The X Factor beget The Voice. MasterChef beget My Kitchen Rules. The Block beget Renovation Rescue (if you remember the latter, congratulations your one of the 11 people who watched it).

'If it works on Ten it will work even better on Seven," one can imagine the boffins shouting at programming meetings.

In recent years you could watch a cooking show or a dating show or a singing show at any time of the year just by pushing up or down on your television remote.
No one seemed to know whether they were watching Matt on MasterChef or Manu on My Kitchen Rules or Mary on Dating the Devil or Marcus on Australian Idol's Got The X Factor.

As long as they were singing or cooking or sobbing after being dumped, people would watch it.

Perhaps Australia woke up from their couch-potato induced daze that overcame them when Osher Gunsberg was still Andrew G because suddenly they stopped watching these half-arsed attempts at stealing another network's ratings.

It began with Nine's foray into cooking with Hot Plate, which was roundly criticised for being a rip-off of My Kitchen Rules.

Then along came The Bachelor, sure, not an original idea from Ten but at least it was new local programming. It was an unbridled success by Ten standards and the programmers at Nine and Seven were like Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally and were loudly exclaiming 'I'll have what she's having'.

Faster than Bachelorette fleeing from a dirty street pie schedules were filled with dreadful dating shows. Married at First Sight, First Dates, Seven Year Switch, Bride and Prejudice, there has been so many the internet can't accommodate and exhaustive list.

Some of them have worked, others have failed.

Then along came Ninja Warrior. The Nine fitspo series that became an absolute ratings juggernaut.

Everyone from the Goggleboxers to your mum was obsessed with the format and there was almost a national plebiscite asking for the head of Nine boss Hugh Marks when no one actually won the series.

The climbing chalk had barely blown off Mount Midoriyama before rival programmers were scrambling for their own version they could rush into this year's schedule in the hope of capturing a large slice of the active-wear viewing audience before Nine could bring back the Ninjas.

Hence Australian Spartan. And it was an unmitigated failure.

The series premiered with a meager audience of just 816,000 viewers in the five capital cities, just a bit more than half of the people who tuned in to Married At First Sight.

A week later it had dropped back to 524,00 and Seven took no time in yanking it from the schedule to be replaced by My Kitchen Rules.

There was nothing wrong with Spartan, it was as good as Ninja Warrior as it offered the same inspirational/aspirational viewing that its higher-rating rival delivered.

It's just that people are sick of seeing the same thing on a different channel.

In an environment where nary an original thought passes through a programmer's brain the viewing public have sent a resounding message.

'Do better!'

Seven has resolved to bring Spartan back during the AFL season in a few weeks, so maybe they aren't listening.

But if all the networks continue to peer over the fence like a nosy neighbour, then we can only expect streaming audiences to grow in rapid correlation to terrestrial television viewing as it slides into oblivion.

https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/has-the-nation-tired-of-watchi...

You're so right Red, absolute rubbish, but I wouldn't include Master Chef in that because it really deals with culinary skills.

Apart from the few bright spots from ABC Drama and some old series (but I've seen most of them) on 7TWO and GEM, plus the occasional good doco and European movie on SBS, I mainly watch DVDs.

My tastes are very eclectic, and I'm happy to consume Trailer Trash TV, to concerts by renowned artists like Andre Rieu, and docos on Roman history and Getaway, etc.

Lord Herbert wrote on Mar 11^th, 2018 at 12:12pm:


You'd have a lot in common with Marla then but not I think Andre Rieue. I like Andre. I like the scmalziness of it as well as the professionalism I appreciate as an ex-muso

Really good tv apparently does not sell product, people use add breaks to do other things.

That is so true, the shows now are so puke ,,, the ads are the best part.

I don't watch anything live, so that means I speed through the ads at x16.

Just thinking about what we call the reality rubbish, the advertisers wouldn't pour in millions without a big enough audience.

miketrees wrote on Mar 11^th, 2018 at 12:27pm:


Read it back then. It was required reading at uni, as was The Waste Makers I think.

bogarde73 wrote on Mar 11^th, 2018 at 12:33pm:


Nor do I EVER watch anything 'live'. I even record what they jokingly call 'The News' so as to watch it later with a finger on the Remote button's Fast Forward. With the amount of commercial breaks, my finger does a jitterbug dance because there are so many interruptions to the National News services. It's like a nervous twitch.