Television ain’t what it used to be… Park Street

A new reality show was launched on [channel] recently called Park Street. The show was a flop. While a show being a flop is nothing surprising, the extent to which this show failed is something unheard of in television history (at least in Australia anyway).

Background
First some background on what the show was about. Park Street was meant to be a fly on the wall reality series that follows the editors and writers at some of the most famous magazines in Sydney for women, these include Cosmopolitan, Dolly and the like.

Park Street was successful though in earning the title of the biggest flop in Australian television history. So just how bad was it?

Ben Elton
Well take Ben Elton’s new show which was axed from Channel 9 after 3 episodes. All though ratings started reasonably strong at over 600,000 by the time the lame/crude jokes (I have been told) started getting underway people were tuning out leaving Ben with an average viewer ship of around 440,000. This was not enough for Channel 9 and the show was dumped.

Compare that to Park Street, which had a total of 6,289 viewers across Australia. For a television show this is unheard of, however to put insult to injury, not a single person from Adelaide or Melbourne tuned in. The majority of the viewers had come from Brisbane. The idea that not a single person in a state is watching your show sounds like some kind of comedy sketch.

Caveat…
To be fair though, the show was broadcast on Arena which is cable, and not everyone has cable and considering there are 30 or more channels it’s possible that not every channel will get viewer ship. However it is sad that the Sydney local industry has been suffering when it comes to original content lately. Hopefully things will improve.

While I’m sure you probably would not care to watch this, I included the link for the 1 or 2 people that would to an interview with Park Street’s ‘stars’. Check it out below:

http://video.au.msn.com/watch/video/new-reality-show-park-street/xl1a8ir

Arena really dropped the ball on this one.

0 replies

Leave a Reply

Want to join the discussion?
Feel free to contribute!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.