HD Heads-Up: September 14-20
September 5, 2013 
3 Comments
Bad news for fans of The Good Wife: TV3 doesn’t plan to premiere season three on the back of the season two re-runs.
The September 17 finale is the last episode TV3 will air for the foreseeable future.
At one stage it looked as if the channel wanted to build a late-night audience for one of the best US network dramas on TV ahead of launching season three (as it’s tried to do, to no avail, with Hawaii Five-O).
But it’s since decided to run out the remaining season one episodes of Chicago Fire post-Nightline on Tuesdays and has indefinitely postponed The Good Wife’s third season.
Moreover, it’s doing so on the eve of season five starting in the US, which means anyone who had a remote interest in the series might as well give up all hope of waiting for it to resurface and instead seek it out online.
Why TV3 continues to give Good Wife fans short shrift beggars belief when its late-night schedule is crammed with re-runs of done-to-death procedurals and inferior female-skewed fare like Medium and In Plain Sight.
In the meantime, all of the networks are refreshing their schedules ahead of the fourth quarter.
TV3 is ending Thursday’s Grand Designs Revisited and its Friday movie season (presumably to clear the decks for The X Factor USA in week 39 — two weeks after its September 11 premiere in the US) while TV One has season finales of Mr Selfridge (TV One, 10.10 Sunday), Life Flight (TV One, 8.00 Monday) and Coastwatch (TV One, 7.30 Tuesday).
TV2 is strengthening some of its weeknight slots, starting with another Aussie wizard special, Cosentino: The Magic, The Mystery, The Madness (7.30 Monday), which pre-empts HD sitcoms The Middle and Suburgatory for that week only.
Also returning are Kitchen Nightmares (9.30 Monday) and Embarrassing Fat Bodies (9.30 Tuesday).
The former will push back Private Practice to 10.30 and the latter, Body of Proof to 10.30, Zero Hour to 11.30 and The Protector to 12.30.
A casualty of PP’s late slot is Monday Mornings, which has been pulled.
Other HD programming of note for the week starting September 14 includes:
❑ The 90-minute season premiere of NZ’s Got Talent (TV One, 7.30 Sunday), which pushes back Call the Midwife to 9.00
❑ The penultimate episode of The Almighty Johnsons (TV3, 8.30 Thursday) and the season finale of Super City (TV3, 10.20 Friday)
❑ The network HD premieres of The Smurfs (TV2, 7.30 Sunday) and Johnny English Reborn (TV3, 7.30 Friday)
❑ Re-runs of Horton Hears a Who! (TV3, 7.00 Sunday), Juno (TV3, 8.50 Sunday), The X-Files: I Want to Believe (TV3, 10.55 Sunday) and Die Hard 2 (TV3, 8.35 Monday).
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September 5, 2013 at 11:58 pm
Well, that’s disappointing news for The Good Wife! Why can’t TV3 just utilise its ondemand service and play out all the episodes until it finds a time slot for it or move it to its Saturday drama slot? Such a good drama being wasted. Also TV One tweeted today that they are giving up on Winners and Losers which is moving to 10.30 Sundays, which is appalling when they should of just paired it with the returning Rafters!
Agree with you on both counts, Leo. But now that MediaWorks no longer has an output deal with CBS Studios International, with which it would have scored Under the Dome, it’s no longer committed to series like The Good Wife. TV One tried to be too clever with Winners & Losers: instead of keeping it paired with Rafters, it tried to make the series stand alone and having fiddled with it in different time slots, has now destroyed the following it had post-Rafters.
I bet TV3 are kicking themselves at missing out on Under The Dome! TV One needs to learn that it shouldn’t mess around with programmes and confuse the audience.