Go ... the latest move for Channel Nine's Excess Baggage. Photo: Channel Nine
Michael Idato, The Sydney Morning Herald, reports
The ratings year has not even officially begun and it has claimed its first scalp.
The Nine Network's heavily promoted Excess Baggage has lived up to its title. The network will shed the show from its schedule, relegating it to the digital channel Go from next Monday.
"We have decided to move Excess Baggage," Nine's head of programming and production Andrew Backwell said. "The show has performed below expectations, so it is a move we believe will provide the best possible audience for the show."
Nine launched the show with huge fanfare, and a production and marketing price tag of over $20 million, confident it would topple Ten's The Biggest Loser and cement Nine's control of the 7pm timeslot.
Nine has been agitating to control the slot following two big hits there last year, the property renovation series The Block and the local version of the US reality format The Celebrity Apprentice.
What Nine did not bank on was reality/weight loss genre fatigue and splitting the audience by putting two similar shows up against each other.
It also failed to accurately measure the popularity of Home & Away, which also airs in the slot, and whose audience loyalty, after 24 years, is flexible but ultimately unbreakable. That show is winning the slot with over one million viewers and, on most nights, a commanding margin.
Excess Baggage, which follows a group of celebrities and non-celebrities, on a weight-loss boot camp, made a softer-than-expected debut with only 880,000 viewers.
Ten had rushed its own show, The Biggest Loser, into the slot a week earlier in the hope that capturing an audience early would give it an edge. That move, costly in the first week with weaker-than-expected numbers, has proved to be a winning one.
Ten, with a lower audience base and lower audience volume expectations for the show, is far more easily able to weather weak numbers in the slot than Nine which would, off the back of The Block and Celebrity Apprentice, charged advertisers a premium for access to the show.
The Biggest Loser is now drawing around 800,000 viewers a night, while Excess Baggage languishes around the 600,000 mark. When Excess Baggage departs the slot, Ten could realistically build The Biggest Loser to the million-viewer threshhold.
Speculation has dogged Excess Baggage since its launch that Nine would pull it. Of the three commercial networks, Nine has overtaken Seven in recent years as the fastest to hit the eject button on underperforming new shows.
Last year's Ben Elton's Live from Planet Earth was pulled after only three broadcasts. Another show, The Joy of Sets, was pushed out of its prime-time slot after four weeks. Clever (2006) and Our Place (2005) were pulled after five weeks.
Nine also holds the record for fastest cancellation in history - 1992's Doug Mulray's Naughtiest Home Videos was axed while it was still on air, only 35 minutes into its hour, and on the command of the network's then-owner Kerry Packer.
Seven's record was almost equally impressive: Let Loose Live (2005; two weeks), The Comedy Sale (1993; three weeks), The Hamish & Andy Show (2004; six weeks) and The Big News (1999; seven weeks).
Although Excess Baggage has delivered low numbers for Nine, they will not hurt the network's overall performance until the 2012 ratings year officially begins this Sunday.
The short-term replacement will be repeats of The Big Bang Theory, but Nine has leaned very heavily on that show in the past to plug gaps in its schedule.
Since January 1 this year Nine has screened 77 episodes of the show. Three more will screen tonight, two on Nine and one on Go.
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