Sad end of Aussie TV shows that died on the air

The end-of-year TV ratings are almost in. But the biggest losers have already been decided. Did you watch them?

Free-to-air TV is going the way of Blockbuster video stores and dine-in Pizza Huts.

It’ll soon be a relic of a different time. A better time. But a time that no longer exists. A time when we flipped through TV Hits magazines – admiring the advertisements for inflatable furniture – while waiting in line at a HMV to buy the hot debut CD from Macy Gray on the very day it was released.

Then we’d rush home and – if it was a Monday night – flip on Channel 9 to catch the latest episode of Friends. If you missed it, you’d be out of the loop the next day with all the conversations happening around the schoolyard or office.

That kind of appointment viewing seems to have been killed off this year. Particularly with our own once-loved local shows. They’re dead in the water and network execs don’t know how to revive ’em. Stiff drinks will be poured at the end of this coming week when the year’s official TV ratings period wraps up.

Channel 10 and Channel 7 threw everything at the wall during these final months but nothing they aired reached great heights. Instead, their offerings just drifted to the ground, like paper planes made out of tissues.

For Seven, Big Brother VIP hasn’t been worth the big bucks the network paid to lure sorta-celebrities like Caitlyn Jenner and Meghan Markle’s weird half-brother into the mansion. It peaked at 380,000 metro viewers in its launch week and dropped to a low of just 295,000 for last Wednesday’s episode. All up, the season averaged about 339,000 metro views each episode.

By comparison, The Block hovered between 850,000 and a million metro viewers.

It’s hard to believe that Aussies weren’t dazzled by the glitz and glamour of Thomas Markle Jr.

The most talked-about flops have been Ten’s The Bachelor and The Bachelorette franchises. It feels like the plummeting ratings have been getting reported in real time like Covid case numbers.

The Bachelor had its worst launch with just 482,000 metro viewers tuning in. Throughout the series, it dipped to a low of 360,000.

And things got worse with The Bachelorette. It only launched to 397,000 metro viewers, dipped to a low of 253,000 and then, for several episodes, rated so poorly it didn’t even make it onto the Top 20 overnight figures.

In a shaky sign, the guys over at Ten attempted to kill off both series quicker by airing double episodes. They were dodging flops left, right and centre. Remember the ill-fated Making It? Of course you don’t, and that’s precisely my point.

Making It was a local version of an American series about people who make DIY craft projects. If we wanted to watch that we’d just drive around the suburbs on a Saturday, stopping off at random school fetes. And at least then we could buy cheap cake from the home-bake stall.

Not even the cheese wheels could lure us into watching The Bachelorette.

There have been some successes on TV this year. Nine has had a solid base with Married At First Sight and The Block. And their weird new experiment Parental Guidance that just wrapped up this week did good numbers compared to Big Brother VIP and The Bachelorette.

Nine has found a sweet spot with these three offerings. We get to judge bad relationships, then judge bad décor choices, then judge other people’s parenting styles. Genius. They’re our three favourite things to judge. Now if we could figure out a way to combine all three …

Reality shows have long been Australia’s version of prestige television. While the US produces nuanced programs with complex storylines and complicated characters, we have bogans calling each other the C-word on The Bachelor and Meghan Markle’s weird half-brother mooching around the Big Brother mansion.

It might not be the most sophisticated thing, but it’s ours. And we’ve gotta be careful. When we stop tuning in, the shows get axed.

It’s like when a longstanding local café closes down in your neighbourhood and everyone sighs and laments the changing times but no one ever actually went to it. The cakes always looked stale and the coffee tasted like mop water. Still, it was just nice knowing it was there.

That’s what shows like The Bachelor are. A comforting combination of familiarity, stale cakes and mop water.

Twitter, Facebook: @hellojamesweir