HD Ratings: Fiery Start for Cooks

TVNZ 1’s premiere of Cooks on Fire on Thursday couldn’t match the previous week’s Great Kiwi Bake Off crossover with Celebrity Treasure Island but still made a competitive debut.

It averaged 3.4% of 25-54 year-olds, the network’s core commercial demographic, and 2.4% of 18-49s.

The BBQ reality show lost to TVNZ 2’s Ten 7 Aotearoa (3.3%/2.98%) and Motorway Patrol (4.0%/2.8%) but finished well ahead of Three’s Love It or List It Australia (2.2%/1.5%).

Three rebounded with The Graham Norton Show at 8.30. After several months off-air, the talk show has been slowly building since its return and last week averaged 2.8%/2.2%.

That was enough to beat TVNZ 2’s Embarrassing Bodies (2.1%/1.6%) and TVNZ 1’s Mrs Brown’s Boys (1.8%/1.3%) and Hard Quiz (0.6%/0.4%).

The 9.30 hour was more mixed, with Coronation Street averaging 0.5%/03%, TVNZ 2’s The Bridge 0.6%/0.4% and Three’s Comedians Giving Lectures 0.8%/0.7% and Newshub Live 0.2%.

Eden’s Ridley improved to 0.2%/0.1% while Prime’s A Question of Justice averaged0.1% each and Duke’s Outback Car Hunters 0.4%.

TVNZ 1 won the night with easily the biggest key demo shares while Three led TVNZ 2 by 3-4 points.

Note: These overnight ratings exclude viewership of the networks’ +1 SD channels.