Channel Ten has been jilted on the dance floor yet again.

”WANTED: chief programming officer for Australian television network. The
applicant must be experienced in developing programs and building a successful
schedule, and must be able to satisfy an increasingly sceptical public. The right
person must be able to present programming options to the network’s board, and
accept its confounding decisions, and should be comfortable with the possibility that
they’ll be fired if a disastrous show hosted by the chairman’s wife is canned. Magic
wand not essential, but definitely helpful.”

Channel Ten’s year, which has been bordering on the grim for months, reached the
nightmarish last week when the reality dance competition series Everybody Dance
Now was cancelled after four episodes. The series was meant to be a key piece of Ten’s inventory for the second half of 2012 but the final episode screened couldn’t
even draw 400,000 viewers.

Within days the embattled network’s chief programming officer, David Mott, had
resigned after 16 years with Ten. He had plenty of successes to his name,
including MasterChef, Thank God You’re Here and Australian Idol, but the failures
were reaching an epidemic level. In the wake of Mott’s departure Ten appears to be
mired in crisis – it’s being thumped by Channel Seven, Channel Nine and the ABC in
the ratings.

But Mott was just a single piece, albeit a crucial one, in Ten’s set-up. The
programmers and producers have put together a promising, offbeat reality show
with I Will Survive, which takes Broadway hopefuls to the outback via auditions for
the stage show Priscilla, Queen of the Desert: The Musical, but audiences had to
fight to find it on air after several scheduling changes before its debut.

There’s even been a worthy addition to Ten’s schedule with the recent debut
of Puberty Blues, which drew respectable audience figures of just less than 1 million
viewers for its first two episodes. While it’s a pleasure to have Claudia Karvan’s talent
back on free-to-air, the show’s single promising hour can’t make up for the
proliferation of Modern Family repeats that are being used to desperately fill every
gap in prime time. It was only eight months ago that Ten was plugging its Super
Sunday, in which a dedicated Modern Family timeslot sat with Young Talent
Time, New Girland Homeland, the best drama Ten has had in years.

Since then Ten has misfired repeatedly. The expensive Breakfast has barely
registered with audiences, despite the recruitment of big-money Kiwi import Paul
Henry, while Everybody Dance Now was a poor attempt to graft the imported-judge
angle of The Voice onto the tired bones of So You Think You Can Dance Australia,
which had slowly sunk in the ratings over three seasons on Ten. Sarah Murdoch was
a fine host on Australia’s Next Top Model, giving the show desperately needed moral
strength, but her school ma’am positivity was wrong for a dance competition.

She is married to the chairman of Ten Network Holdings, Lachlan Murdoch, and he
and the rest of the board have to accept a proportion of the blame for 2012’s
performance, especially since they have been approving or rejecting programming
initiatives. It was the board that signed off on Being Lara Bingle and The Shire, new
reality shows meant to inspire social conversation, but whose tackiness drew only
mass derision and average-at-best ratings.

In the late ’90s Channel Ten occupied a lucrative niche, skewing to teens and
twentysomethings with shows such as The Simpsons and The X-Files. But that era is
gone and Lara Bingle cannot bring it back (or achieve much of anything else). Ten
needs to rethink its philosophy and act decisively. The second season of its best
show Homeland begins on September 30 in the US. Surely, Ten will screen it within
hours to add some much-needed quality to its line-up?

Craig Mathieson – SMH – August 30, 2012