Ten scraps Rove’s new show after two weeks

Ten content chief Beverley McGarvey has defended the swift axing of Rove McManus's Saturday night show.

Rove McManus. Picture: Jonathan Ng

Network Ten's content chief Beverley McGarvey has defended the swift and brutal axing of Rove McManus's Saturday night entertainment show after only two weeks, saying it failed to attract a decent audience.

Ms McGarvey, who has worked at the free-to-air TV broadcaster for 13 years, said two weeks was ‘‘short’’, particularly as Ten had a reputation of giving new programs time to build a following, but Saturday nights were “extraordinarily challenging”.

The decision to axe Saturday Night Rove, which was made jointly with McManus, was based on extensive data that showed the program failed to attract audiences before, during and at the end.

McManus, a three-time Gold Logie winner who has worked in TV and radio for more than two decades, was up against the AFL and NRL on Seven and Nine, plus a mountain of shows and movies on streaming platforms, Netflix, Foxtel and the ABC. The move comes six weeks after Ten, which is owned by US entertainment group CBS, cut ties with MasterChef Australia’s three hosts and chefs George Calombaris, Matt Preston and Gary Mehigan after falling out over money.

The long-running cooking show struggled to attract viewers, with Nine racing ahead in the ratings battle with reality dating show Married At First Sight and new Lego building competition show Lego Masters.

Beverley McGarvey, the chief programming officer at Network Ten.

‘‘If you look at the data, and the minute by minutes across the hour, the week on week, the competition, there were 10 factors that led us to the decision that it probably wouldn't get too much better,’’ Ms McGarvey told The Australian. ‘‘And it would be better for all parties to kind of cut it off now, and that was a decision that we made with him.

‘‘Sometimes you have to give things time, and sometimes you have to do things quickly and just take the band-aid off, and I think the art and the skill is probably knowing which is which.’’

Saturday Night Rove, which initially aired as a single episode during the Ten’s inaugural pilot week last year, premiered with 244,000 metropolitan viewers last month but then fell sharply to just 138,000 viewers in the second week. It joins a growing number of shows on the scrapheap, including Ten’s Pointless and Sunday Night Takeaway, plus Seven’s Andrew Denton's Interview.

‘‘It’s really competitive on a Saturday night, and sport does well and older-skewing content kind of does well, the likes of the ABC, so it’s very hard to cut through that middle area, and it just didn’t resonate with those people,’’ she said.

Even movies that would have attracted 800,000 viewers on free-to-air TV on a Saturday night now only deliver about 180,000 people.

‘‘Of course Seven, Nine, Foxtel, Netflix and the ABC are all our competition but I think we have to think about what brings people to our channel,’’ she said, citing Survivor as a good example of a show that brings ‘‘casual TV viewers’’.

Ms McGarvey is focused on Ten’s second annual pilot week, which kicked off on Sunday night with Sydney’s Crazy Rich Asians, new shows, podcasts and sporting events.

Pilot week will also include, I Am … Roxy, featuring publicity queen Roxy Jacenko, and My 80 Year Old Flatmate.

Ten is betting its new celebrity singing competition The Masked Singer, featuring actor Lindsay Lohan, will be very popular following its huge success on Fox in the US.

It will also showcase the Rugby World Cup over six weeks, plus Supercars and the Melbourne Cup Carnival.

Ms McGarvey said Ten would unveil MasterChef's new hosts, who had a “love of food”, at its annual upfront event on October 10.