New Season: TV2 in Top Gear on Thursday
March 20, 2015 
2 Comments
TV3 didn’t dent TV2’s Thursday night dominance with its replacement programming for low-rating crime dramas Backstrom and Motive.
It’s puzzling, given the size of MediaWorks’ film library, why the channel would pick a title as dated and lacklustre as The Jackal to open its action movie season.
Abruptly dumping Backstrom and Motive after just two weeks for such second-tier fare served only to hurt the channel’s brand while still straitjacketing its ratings and cementing TV2’s supremacy.
Not even publicity about Jeremy Clarkson’s Top Gear stoush was enough to stoke interest in the latest episode of TV3’s worldwide BBC hit.
It averaged a solid but unexceptional 4.8% – 6.2% of the commercial demographics against TV2’s Police Ten 7 (9.4% – 10.2%) and Highway Patrol (9.4% – 10.7%).
But Clarkson & co did out-rate TV1’s premiere of Katherine Mills: Mind Games (2.4% – 6.2%) in all the key demos except household shoppers with kids.
TV2’s dominance continued with The Flash (4.4% – 8.8%) and Arrow (3.0% – 4.9%) while TV1’s Offspring was steady (2.9% – 5.1%) and TV3’s SD re-run of The Jackal averaged 2.1% – 2.8%.
The previous week, Backstrom averaged 2.0% – 3.0% and Motive, 0.8% – 1.5%.
The 18-year-old Bruce Willis flop did improve on both — its average was dragged down by its length — but still rated well below the radar and contributed to TV2 easily winning the night in all the key demos.
The HD networks’ primetime channel shares and ratings were:
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April 14, 2017 at 12:45 pm
Why is TVNZ dumping Trial and Error to Duke? Or do we have something better coming?
Presumably programmers think it’s a better fit for that channel’s younger make-skewing audience. However, the broadcaster has said it will eventually screen on TVNZ 2 (but expect it to be late-night).