HD Ratings: Westside Crushes Criminal Minds

The return of Westside for its sixth and final season won its 8.30 Monday slot in all the core commercial demographics as well as viewers 5+.

The premiere rated lower than the previous week’s Patrick Gower: On Weed but still thrashed the TVNZ competition and could jettison from primetime a long-running TVNZ 1 staple.

It averaged a solid 5.9% of Three’s target audience, 25-54 year-olds, compared to Criminal Minds’ 1.5%, MasterChef Australia’s 5.9% and The Farmer Wants a Wife’s 3.4%.

TVNZ 1 will be re-evaluating Criminal Minds’ future at 8.30, given this is its 15th and final season, and may move it to 9.30 Mondays.

Westside overlapped with the 90-minute MasterChef’s last half-hour. While it lost to MasterChef’s final quarter segment in the 25-54 and household shopper demos, in the 18-49 and 18-39 contests it won the full half-hour.

Westside lead-in Grand Designs NZ continues to rate strongly, proving more popular than MasterChef in the 18-49 and 18-39 demos and competitive in the others.

Westside’s popularity wasn’t enough, however, for lead-out Magnum PI to win its slot. Although it out-rated TVNZ 1’s World’s Deadliest in all the major demos, it was no match for TVNZ 2’s Farmer.

Fair Go continues to have a firm hold on 25-54 viewers but Kids: An Instruction Manual With Nigel Latta couldn’t capitalise on its 5.9% lead-in, averaging only 3.4%.

The strength of Three’s primetime line-up helped it to win the night’s biggest shares of the 25-54, 18-49 and 18-39 demos while TVNZ 2 carried household shoppers with kids.

Here are last Monday’s 20 most-watched primetime programmes on the free-to-air HD channels (excluding +1 and in order of their 5+ rating and audience share):