Karl, Jazzy and Cass: hot news but not on TV

Why Karl couldn’t just tell his bride no is a mystery, but there is one woman who could have saved him — and it’s not his ex-wife.

Karl Stefanovic and Jasmine Yarbrough at their wedding last week in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.

Yes, I know: you don’t want to hear another word about Karl Stefanovic’s wedding. You don’t want to hear about his new missus; you’re not interested in her dress; you don’t care that he got married; you couldn’t pick the bride out of a line-up. None of this has anything to do with you and your life, why can’t everyone please just go away?

Well, wish granted!

Karl, and presumably Jasmine (together they are apparently “Karmine”, which with a C is a scarlet colour, like the fresh blood all over the floor at Nine this week), are indeed going away.

He has been boned from Today, meaning you’ll no longer be waking up with him, assuming you ever did. Of course, she may yet make it as a famous shoe designer, but let’s wait and see.

In the meantime, sorry to tell you, but this story — the demise of Karl — actually does have something to do with you and the power you have long wielded, without perhaps knowing it. Because, whether you know it or not, you’ve changed in recent years, and not only in ways that are chiefly your business.

You’ve changed in ways that have huge ramifications not only for Karl but for everyone who works in the media.

For everyone who works in ­advertising.

For everyone with products to sell.

How so? Let’s start with a question in two parts:

a) When was the last time you watched free-to-air TV?

b) What did you watch? (I’m prepared to bet it was live sport, but first things first.)

If you’re like most Australians, you don’t watch free-to-air anywhere near as much as you used to, and why would you? You’ve got news and entertainment coming at you all day on your various ­devices. The effect of this change in your habits can be, and is being, measured: according to the 2017 screen use report, Australians last year spent an average of two hours and 41 minutes each day watching TV at home.

Five years ago, it was rather more than three hours a day.

So that’s a 20 per cent drop by my dodgy maths, which is terrible news for the makers of, and the advertisers on, free-to-air. And there is worse news to come: while all age groups are watching less TV than they once did, 18 to 24-year-olds — arguably the future — are watching less of it than anyone else.

What are they doing instead?

They’re on YouTube, they’re scrolling through social media, they’ve got music streaming ser­vices, and perhaps you’ve heard about the online game Fortnite? My god, don’t they love Fortnite!

Pre-teens aren’t watching TV either. When was the last time your grandkids came around and watched cartoons? Look around, everyone in your house has a personal device. Count them up, all the iPhones, the iPads, the laptops. How many have you got? Six in a household is no longer unusual.

Now to the second part of the earlier question: what did you watch the last time you sat down to watch something on free-to-air TV? Almost certainly it was sport because sport is the one thing that people still will sit down to watch as it happens.

The AFL grand final.

The Australian Open men’s singles final.

The Olympic Games.

These shows still top the ratings every year because people like to watch them as they’re happening. They also like to watch reality TV, especially the finales of shows such as MasterChef, because, if you think about it, they’re a bit like sport. They play out like a contest — there will be elimination rounds, fans will get behind certain contestants, and so on — and you pretty much have to watch the ­finale as it happens, as you do with sport.

The rest of the TV schedule — the not-sport and not-reality TV schedule — is under real pressure.

The Nine Network is looking for ways to survive in this new environment. That’s why this year it bought Fairfax Media, not for the investigative journalism but for the online properties, especially real estate website Domain, and for Stan, the streaming service, which is perhaps the future.

The fact it’s the future means we’re not there yet. There is still some money to be made in free-to-air, and breakfast TV is an important part of the mix. But it’s under immense pressure.

The two big breakfast shows — Today on the Nine Network and Sunrise on Seven — simply don’t rate the way they used to.

Sunrise is ahead in all the major capitals this year, but look at the numbers: it’s averaging 263,000 (metro) viewers a day, to Today’s 244,000 (this shouldn’t be taken to mean that only 263,000 people tune in; hundreds of thousands of people watch at least a few minutes of breakfast TV each week, but hardly anyone watches an entire three-hour show.)

Both shows are down about 60,000 viewers each on average compared with last year. Neither has increased its audience, and neither can afford to alienate the viewers who remain.

Which brings us back to Karl.

As everyone knows, Karl in 2016 left Cass Thorburn, his wife of 20-plus years and the mother of his three children. The Nine Network used to be able to manage this kind of thing. It controlled TV news and current affairs. It also owned a swag of glossy magazines, including The A ustralian Women’s Weekly, where stars were made and polished.

Nine can’t control the publicity it generates any more. Because of the internet.

You — or maybe your partner, kids and grandkids — are glued to your various screens, and Karl’s bust-up and his subsequent hook-up with new bride Jasmine has proved unbelievably popular as clickbait. It’s a real-life story but it reads like a soap opera: the discarded wife snapped on a windswept beach smoking her lonely ciggies while the new blonde on her ex-husband’s arm is glowing in a pink bikini.

You may claim not to care about the story but the stats don’t lie: absolutely anything to do with Cass, Karl and Jasmine rates its socks off. Online.

You know that old saying, all publicity is good publicity? This has not been good for Karl.

None of us can know what went on in his marriage, how lonely he may have been, but it looks for all the world as if he has moved on hellishly quickly, with a much younger woman. Add to this the fact viewers haven’t warmed to Jasmine, which is odd because they’d certainly recognise her:

Jasmine grew up in Brisbane. Her parents are called Cheryl (Chezza) and Bob. They call themselves the Yarbys. The family is Brisbane suburbs made good. (Bob is a well-paid packaging executive; Cheryl is a schoolteacher who gave up work to rear the kids.) There are three Yarby children, with matchy-matchy names (Jade, Jasmine and Josh).

Jasmine is especially close to her father, whom she calls Daddy on Instagram. She likes to post pictures of herself with her arms thrown around his neck, planting wet kisses on his cheek, with captions such as: “Happy, happy, happy 70th birthday Daddy! I love you with all my heart!” and she thanks him for supporting her in everything she has ever wanted to do in her life, such as living in Los Angeles and designing shoes.

Karl, too, seems highly motivated to give Jasmine what she wants; last week, that was a big white wedding. Her special day. From the looks of things, he gave in on everything, including the seven bridesmaids and the thousand fairy lights and the picture spread in Who magazine.

And why shouldn’t she have it? It’s not her second wedding. It’s his.

Why Karl couldn’t find a way to say no to her — No, babe, I love you, but the optics. Our viewers are mostly mums and they’re really conservative on family values — is a mystery known only to them. It must be love.

And so the wedding rolled around and it was the final straw for Nine to see Jazzy — truly a name that could not have been scripted — standing there with legs stretching from Sydney to Cabos San Lucas, while the ex, Cass, was talking to women’s magazines about how she hardly ever gets a chance to get dressed up because she’s too busy running the Toilet Duck under the rim.

Nobody could survive that kind of publicity, not even someone as well-liked and as hugely admired as Karl once was.

No, that’s not quite right. Karl could perhaps have survived — maybe — if he’d had a supportive woman by his side on the Today couch, somebody mature enough to understand that long marriages do sometimes end, that people can and do move on, that it’s nobody’s business really, that everything will be OK, provided the kids are all right …

Where to find such a person?

Lisa Wilkinson! Karl’s on-screen partner for a decade. But Nine let Lisa walk.

At a time of its great, existential crisis, for the sake of maybe $200,000 a year — a couple of Chicken Tonight ads — they let the most mature and stable ­presence on the show walk out the door.

And still, I’d argue, Karl might have survived had the new pairing with Georgie Gardner worked out, except they apparently don’t like each other, so what was Nine even thinking? And then came the secretly taped call with Karl on the phone to his brother Peter — who also was boned by Nine this week — dissing the network that had been oh-so-patient for oh-so-long until it could risk no longer the idea of the sun setting on Today, and took Karl out at dawn instead.