HD Heads-Up: August 6

➢➢ Three has pulled new episodes of Chicago Med from primetime Saturday and relegated it to late-night Sunday. The changeover occurs this weekend after six weeks of persistently low ratings. Season three will bump the midnight repeat of Entertainment Tonight Weekend while replacing Chicago Med and re-runs of NCIS will be movies, starting with The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Chicago Med will now follow new episodes of Humans, which has been dumped from 9.30 Mondays after abysmal ratings. Chicago Med continues the failure of the Dick Wolf franchise to rate here, with Chicago Fire, Chicago PD and Chicago Justice tanking as well …

➢➢ Three’s puzzling programming of Chicago Med was always going to undermine its prospects. NZ is a market where experiments to run series on Saturday and Sundays nights instead of movies have largely failed for Three and TVNZ 2. If Chicago Med was going to draw a regular audience, it needed a consistent time slot and a better stablemate than 15-year-old eps of NCIS, which have had their potential exhausted on Three and Sky …

➢➢ TVNZ 2 also has implemented a late scheduling change and ditched its Tuesday night double-bill of The Middle’s final season. The series will continue to air at 7.30 but replacing the 8.00 episode from tomorrow are re-runs of Motorway Patrol (from episode one of season 14). The network appears to making the switch to try to arrest The Block NZ’s surging success. Last week’s 7.30 ep of The Middle averaged 3.4% of 18-49 year-olds, its target audience, but the second ep dropped to 2.4%. Over the hour the sitcom’s audience declined from 3.5% to 2.3% of this demographic while The Block’s improved from 5.7% to 6.5%, to average 6.2% …

➢➢ MediaWorks reports last night’s episode of The Block was the season’s highest-rating yet. “Sunday night’s room reveal recorded a whopping 29.4% audience share and 10.1 rating point, winning its timeslot amongst the key 25-54 demographic,” it said in a press release (these figures include +1 viewership). “The show also won its timeslot on Monday (29.2% share, 9.2 rating), Tuesday (28.4% share, 7.9 rating) and Wednesday evenings (28.0% share, 8.1 rating).” The Block’s popularity helped Three’s Sunday movie rerun, Knight and Day, to win its slot with 5.6% of 25-54, opposite TVNZ 2’s network movie premiere of The Finest Hours …

➢➢ Season four of Better Call Saul can be streamed from tomorrow on Lightbox. Season four has averaged 9/10 ratings from Rotten Tomatoes’ top critics while Metracritic’s aggregated average was 84/100. Predicts The Hollywood Reporter: “The transmutation of Jimmy to Saul is likely to produce the best balance of darkness and humour that the series has mustered, if for nothing else than there’s a gleeful appreciation on the part of the audience for Saul’s shenanigans; their rising occurrence will be amusing while, at the same time, watching the exacting toll it took on Jimmy to get there will be distressing.” …

➢➢ Scheduled for this week on Prime’s The Late Show With Stephen Colbert are: Rob Reiner (11.35 tonight); Chris Hayes, Rob Corddry and a musical performance by Regina Spektor (11.10 Tuesday), Joe Manganiello and US Senator Cory Booker (11.00 Wednesday); Jim Acosta and Nina Dobrev (11.10 Thursday); and Issa Rae, Darren Criss and Ronny Chieng (10.30 Friday) …