I can only speak for myself but after 2010, the strongest full year of any soap I can remember in ages, the quality dipped hugely the moment Blyth's influence stopped being felt.

It's a depressing mess that has long since lost it's heart and warmth.

Some good news for Five NBC have just closed a deal for another season for Law & Order: SVU and as part of their new agreement with Dick Wolf have picked up new drama Chicago Fire (about fire fighters in Chicago). The NBC schedule is coming together early this year.

the only thing NBC well be announcing on Monday, is the axings, and which comedys are getting half seasons

Great news, great programme. But also very underrated here in the UK.

It wasn't expected to survive the major cast changes it underwent this season. It shows the strength of the programme and its stories that the audience stuck with it.

Deadline is also reporting that NBC are on the verge of closing a deal for a straight to series order on a pirate drama based on the book The Republic of Pirates (which NBC optioned a while back) to be written by Luther's Neil Cross and debut in March next year.

It'll be interesting to see how many more pick-ups NBC actually make. I'd imagine there's more than a couple of drama ones left to come and given the big name reality producers they just signed up I suspect we'll get some unscripted content of some kind at the up fronts as well.


They haven't (in the US at least). Ratings are down but things are so bad at NBC at this point that it doesn't matter a great deal. The major thing I thought it would have going against it is how expensive it is.

My understanding though, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, is that unlike most network shows SVU has a (regular?) repeat slot on NBC and it tends to pick up a fair few viewers through that?

Just what you all want to read - another post on BGT!


A bit of a shocker there, especially considering the judges are generally getting the thumbs up and there is a concensus the talent level is up this year. It could bounce back tonight though and just be a strange anomoly, but if it doesn't I'm not quite sure what they can do as unlike other shows there isn't anything they've obviously done wrong.


I'd disagree - the talent is the best since 2009 IMO with far fewer joke acts than usual and a genuine decent crop of young talented acts progressing each night to the final.


Usually during the show I get sick of the filler acts and think they should cut it back, but so far this week I'd say there haven't really been any acts who shouldn't be there (until Exterminate tomorrow), and one thing increasing it by an extra act has done means the acts to ad ratio is slightly better. They still have to only have 2 in the first two parts to get the first two sets of ads in by 8pm, but after that it's generally two or three acts per part.


Ridiculous slot for it - and I think it has had zero promotion either. As I said the other day considering the popularity of Karl Pilkington in An Idiot Abroad you'd think they'd give it a better chance - even 11pm is slightly less graveyard. Do you know how the umpteenth Inbetweeners repeat rated?

P.S. Probably mentioned but C4 have commissioned a full series of Derek.

It has/had a semi-regular repeat on Saturday night. It was doing relatively well there but when you combine the last Saturday repeat with the original for that week it comes out with a 2.3 which still isn't a blockbuster performance for a show with the price tag SVU has. Although to be fair I'm not sure how much of that price tag NBC are still paying and how much is coming out of syndication since the ratings have dropped over the past couple of seasons.

Thanks. Well, if enough viewers have stuck with it for it to be viable for NBC to make more, that's good enough for me. Any other network and it probably would have been toast.

Whilst we're on the subject of US shows, finally caught up with Homeland today. Deary me, what a finale that was. Edge of your seat stuff, if a little predictable towards the end. Fully deserving of its excellent ratings and I can't wait for the next season. David Harewood has tweeted to say he's just read the episode 2 script and it's "already huge!"

If it fails to pick up tonight and the final is less than a success, then the tabloids will have a field day. Sad thing is, Cowell still has to endure TXF for 4 months and if this falters as well, he could call a halt, also ITV could be mortally wounded as much of their success is built on these two shows and they pay for their less popular output.
In the past they could have shrugged off the dismissal of Hughie Green or Bruce's Big Night not delivering, as they were the country's most popular network with only one competitor, but in the multi channel world of 2011 Cowell's shows going wrong are a huge loss and they haven't counted on this.

Going purely on the episode thread Briatin's Got Talent's main show should be slightly up on yesterday but the Results show well down.

Though we already know that the size of DS threads doesn't necessarily equal ratings.

Same as the BB threads keep going all year round and yet it must be the same obsessives that keep posting as few people are interested in some character that appeared for a few weeks in series 3.

"Channel 5 is changing, so watch this space. Never say never."

A positively teaseful way for Jim Rosenthal to bring an end to Five's Europa League coverage.

The main show should be up as there was no EE and the weather (certainly where I am) has taken a turn for the worse today. It was easily the weakest semi so far (still alright though), and they just about managed to avoid another child crying scene at the end! The results show will have done very badly indeed but there isn't much they can do about that. 8.5m and 5.9m (inc +1) are the two numbers swimming about in my head at the moment but we'll see in the morning.

If that was the case, I wonder which rating would be taken forward and debated over the next 4 pages and which would be ignored

I didn't see that happen this morning and there's already quite a gap.

Demographic Information for BBC1 and ITV1 for Monday 30th April to Sunday 6th May: http://i48.tinypic.com/2643jx5.jpg

Top programmes for the week among 18-49 year olds from that list (excludes soaps) were:

1. Britain's Got Talent (Sat): 16.6
2. The Voice UK (Sat): 14.1
3. The Apprentice: 12.0
4. FA Cup Final: 7.9
5. Crimewatch: 7.4
6. Have I Got News For You: 6.8
7. Planet Earth Live: 6.5
8. British Soap Awards: 6.4
9. Traffic Cops: 6.1
10. Not Going Out: 6.1

Note: Each number indicates the % of the UK 18-49 population. For e.g. 16.6% of 18-49s in the UK watched BGT etc.


Sunday's BGT Breakdown:
Monday's ITV1 breakdown:

Going by those figures:

Sunday (9.30-10.00): 8.85m
Monday (9.30-10.00): 8.35m

Hmmm. The Sunday figures and peak is not where I expected it to be.

Sunday (20:00 to 22:00) - 9.05m
Monday (20:00 to 22:00) - 9.34m

I'm confused why the Sunday peak was at 21:10 and not later. After getting to 10.71m, it didn't hit 10 million once after.

21.10-21.15 was when one of the favourites Ashleigh & Pudsey were performing. It seems like even in the all-in-one shows, not everyone is sticking around for the results bit. But retention is better: the results half an hour in the Sunday show held 90% of the preceding half an hour, while on Monday the results half an hour held 80% of BGT's previous half an hour. I think having sub-par guest performers makes a few viewers switch off but then they don't switch back on to watch the results. Back in 2007-2009, IIRC they didn't have guest performers: they had all the contestants perform, just a few minutes of voting over the ad break and then the results pretty much straight away. That was a much better way of keeping viewers sticking around for the results (albeit they get more ad breaks doing it this way).

I agree that stripping the live shows across a week is more of an issue these days, now that the show is ageing and there's not as much buzz around it as the first few years. Momentum doesn't build across the live shows these days, the last few years, the Monday episode has rated best and then its fell quite a bit during the rest of the week before picking up for the final. Personally I think for the long-term future of BGT, it needs to be stripped back a little bit and a reduction in semi-finalists is key. There's too much filler being put through when there's 45 semi-finalists, if they were to cut it down to about 30, they could cut the rubbish out and it would be a better viewing experience for people at home. Also if there's fewer contestants, viewers can identify them more and I'm sure at the moment there's contestants in the semis who many viewers don't even recognise as they had barely any screen time during the auditions. Fewer contestants also means less repetition with all the samey dance troupes and singers that currently happens.

What I think they should do is 8 auditions shows across four weeks (Saturday and Sunday). And then 4 live 90-minute semi finals over 2 weeks (Saturday 8-9.30pm and Sunday 7.30-9pm) with each having 7 contestants and the results included. And then the final the following weekend. At least that way, the show doesn't have to go up against EE on weeknights or have to air too late for the results, but also it means the wait to see certain semi finalists in the final again would be two weeks max, which is pretty short, and better IMO than having weekly live shows for about 5 weeks. The whole series would be done and dusted in about 7 weeks. Something like this would probably mean a total of 18 hours of BGT for the series, which would be down from 21 hours it currently has, so I'm not sure ITV would do it - but I think in the long-term doing something like this would keep the show a little fresher as if there's fewer contestants and the live shows not as packed across a single week, viewers would be more likely to stick with it. If ITV do really want to keep the 21 hours of BGT, I suppose they could still do this kind of format, with 3 weekends of semi final live shows.

E! are confirming Britney Spears as one of the new X Factor USA judges, with the second and hosts set to be confirmed by Monday.

Also The Voice US second series ended this week - losing half it's audience since episode 2. This post kind of highlights the main problem with the shows format - the Battle part doesn't apply here, but I suspect the voting will get overly complicated here in the next couple of weeks, giving the tabloids more ammunition.
http://www.realityblurred.com/realit...n-two-mistakes

NBC continues to take all the fun out of the upfronts

NBC Picks Up Comedy ‘Guys With Kids’

If I was currently employed on an NB comedy, I would be very nervous, I might return this fall, but I may be like 30 Rock, and have a shortened final season.

That could well work. Cutting the length of the semifinals would help and reducing the number of acts (by cutting a load of the samey dancers and singers as you've said) would certainly improve the shows (although the shows themselves have been fine this year). That scheduling would work nicely and they could get their 21 hours with 2 weeks of semifinals as they could run 9 audition shows instead of 8 and expand the deliberation process into a whole episode (with extra performances like they did last year). Make all those pre-recorded shows 75 mins so they'd have a total of 12.5 hours. Add in 6 hours of semis (4x90 min shows) and the final (either 2.5 hrs on one night or 2x90 min shows across a weekend) and they'd have 21-21.5 hrs (depending on the length of the final) and the show would rate better on the whole, with the extra Sunday episodes particularly helping. An added benefit would be that they could then use the lead-in to launch a new drama in the Sunday 9pm slot (nothing except Corrie benefits from BGT at the moment) so it seems like a much better scheduling pattern to use than the current one.

$15 million for one season if what we are led to believe is true. Gamble, much?