TV2 Frustrates Fringe Fans – Again
August 26, 2010 
6 Comments
After weeks of tolerating absurdly low ratings for Tuesday night repeats of The Mentalist, TV2 at last is dumping the HD drama for movies — with Fringe becoming collateral damage.
The spooky HD sensation will screen for the last time next week, at the later time of 10.15pm, with a network spokesman only able to say, “It’ll return at some point later in the year.”
As frustrating as that is, fans should take heart it doesn’t mean TV2 is ready to consign Fringe to late-night just yet; if that was the intention, it probably would have continued the show in the post-movie slot occupied by the disposable Mad Men-lite drama, Trust Me (which is being pre-empted next week but will return to complete its short run on September 7).
More annoyingly, Fringe’s rescheduling means the NZ release of season two on Blu-ray probably will be delayed until next year, as it’s unusual for DVD distributors to market a high-profile title such as this until after its broadcast run (witness Universal and Heroes).
Moreover, all of this could have been avoided had TV2 not pulled one of the year’s silliest programming strokes, and expected re-runs of The Mentalist to rate opposite Outrageous Fortune only 24 hours after Monday night’s first-run episodes.
The strategy was as flawed as teaming The Mentalist with Fringe, when a better match would have been V or Hard Target, which started last night with double the audience of doco strands Real Life and Inside NZ (likewise, the season three premiere of Chuck clobbered TV3’s HD crime drama, Lie to Me).
Meanwhile, the rescheduling will cost HD diehards two hours a week of 720p programming on TV2, as the movies that will screen in the slot, starting with Red Eye and War of the Worlds, will be SD.
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August 28, 2010 at 12:23 pm
Shocking! Fringe is one of the best programs on TV!! What’s with NZ networks stopping shows midway through seasons this year! Seems to be almost a plague of ‘this show will take a midseason break and return later in the year’!
This is why I have taken to downloading these series when they air overseas as the NZ networks treat up like we don’t matter..
Looks like I might have to turn to alternative means to finish the season.
Maybe a course of “learning to Programme 101” would be in order. Fringe was ace and then we get absolute pap in its place.
I could outprogramme their progamming team better from my couch.
Again they are out of touch with the audience. Ratings are not everything have they heard of loyal and niche?? Give it a couple of weeks and one of the other channels will pick it up and make a better job.
FAIL!
WTF TVNZ???!! Last week’s episode was supposed to be episode 15 ‘Jacksonville,’ but instead they show us episode 16 ‘Peter’…What issue does TV 2 have with fans of Fringe??
After frustration at not being able to match up my archived Fringe episodes I, too, discovered that Jacksonville had been missed out. The episode (according to a full recap on TV.COM) contains sequences where buildings suffer tremors and collapse and I believe TVNZ decided not to air the episode because of the Christchurch Earthquake. Fair enough, but an announcement at the beginning of the programme to that effect would have helped. They did it for the episode of No Ordinary Family entitled No Ordinary Quake and even offered it on TVNZ ondemand. But the S02E15 episode of Fringe didn’t even get that. Biggest problem with that is that particular episode has important revelations for later episodes. [For more discussion on this, see this post.]