TVNZ 1 Washes Hands of Dirty Laundry and Love Child

Love Child will air in peak hour for the last time tonight at 9.50.

As of next week, the Australian drama will screen 11.10pm Fridays and its Wednesday slot will be filled by an extra episode of Dirty Laundry.

TVNZ 1 appears to be burning off the Kiwi drama as quickly as it can after weeks of dismal ratings that have impacted on Love Child’s appeal.

The popularity of neither may have been helped by the irregular running time of lead-in MasterChef Australia but its high ratings should have mitigated this.

Last week’s Dirty Laundry averaged only 2.8% of TVNZ 1’s 25-54 target audience — and that was off the back of MasterChef’s 7.3%.

Moreover, the cooking contest peaked at 8.6% in its last quarter-hour whereas Dirty Laundry’s first quarter-hour averaged only 3.4%.

That’s because there was a big switch-over to The Big Bang Theory on TVNZ 2, which built from 5.1% in its first quarter-hour to 6.9%; TV3’s Chicago Med was relatively steady for the 8.30 hour, averaging 3.4%.

Love Child fared even worse than Dirty Laundry, averaging 1.3% against The Mysteries of Laura’s 3.5% and Hawaii Five-O’s 3.4%.

Laundry’s premiere averaged 5.4% of 25-54 year-olds and Love Child’s, 2.8%.

The following week, the former slumped to 3.5%, but still out-rated Chicago Med in the demo, and the latter rebounded slightly.

But for most of October, Laundry averaged 2.3% – 3.1% and Love Child, 1.3% – 2.3%.