HD Feed: September 25

How many more Emmy Awards does The Daily Show With Jon Stewart have to win before it’s picked up for broadcast here? On Monday it won its tenth consecutive Emmy for Outstanding Variety Series, the longest streak in Emmy history, and its eighth Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series. Yet its continuing neglect here, to paraphrase Stewart’s acceptance speech quip, is “f***king predictable”. The Daily Show and stablemate The Colbert Report screen around the world in HD, mostly on Comedy Central, yet Sky’s Comedy Central dumped it after an obscenely short run in 2010 in favour of antiquated sitcoms and corny soft porn. Forget about the demise of TVNZ7 — if ever an omission spoke volumes about the state of TV programming in this country, it’s The Daily Show’s no-show.

You might think The Daily Show would suit SoHo’s smart, funny, edgy mix — Veep, Bored to Death, Girls — but Sky’s entertainment chief Travis Dunbar has ruled this out, along with HBO’s own politically incorrect Emmy-nominee, Real Time With Bill Maher: “I am a genuine fan of Real Time  and The Daily Show, and both shows are nothing short of brilliant, but at the end of the day, SoHo has a pretty strict and established template of quality, provocative, and innovative drama … To try and mess with a formula this successful, irrespective of the merits of the shows you mention, would be in our opinion unwise. It is not broken, and we certainly do not intend to fix it.”

Mad Men may have “set the record for losingest series ever at the Emmys” on Monday, when it didn’t win one of its 17 nominations — a feat that topped Northern Exposure and The Larry Sanders Show scoring zero wins from 16 nods in their heyday. But fans will still want to snap up the Blu-ray box set of season five when it’s released here on November 7. Extras will include 26 cast and crew commentaries spread over the 13 episodes and such featurettes as Mad Men Says the Darndest Things, The Uniform Time Act of 1966, What Shall I Love If Not the Enigma?, Party of the Century, The Music of Mad Men, Newsweek Magazine digital gallery, and Mad Men Easter Eggs.

TV3’s HD re-run of GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra didn’t recruit many viewers on Monday. It averaged 5.6% – 6.0% of key demos against Grey’s Anatomy’s 11.1% – 13.8%, Private Practice’s 7.7% – 12.0% and Unforgettable’s 3.1% – 5.0%. That was well down on the ratings for its network premiere this time last year, when it averaged 7.3% – 8.5%. TV2 owned the night from Shortland Street (18.1% – 22.0%) through to Army Wives (3.2% – 7.0%). This four-and-a-half-hour winning streak across all demos helped HD comedy/drama Shameless to average a relatively sprightly, at least for 11.30pm, 1.7% – 3.9%.