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Dear Brain-dead Network Ten executives,

When a valued [hah!] viewer decides to watch episode one of a new series, lets say Stargate: Universe, they generally look it up in the latest TV guide. This means it’s a really bad idea to change the schedule at the last minute. If you do, they’ll probably miss the first hour and are likely to give up on the series altogether.

If, thanks to a helpful website, they’ve established that you don’t understand that basic concept and have indeed changed the screening times, they’re probably going to want to persevere to the second ep. So obviously you’re not going to screw around with your viewing public two weeks in a row, right?! Without – again – giving the printed guides enough notice to publish the correct times?

I mean, even the most diligent viewer would then face the possibility that the helpful website’s RSS feed would go squiffy and they wouldn’t find out about the last minute change until it was too late. So they’d miss the second ep and be really pissed off.

What would be the point of that? What could be the mega-urgent reason for changing round SGU and Supernatural? Something you didn’t know about five days before, and couldn’t wait another week? Oh, but of course: it just makes you feel like a proper TV executive! “Right, look, we need to change these round right away? Got it?!”

Well, when the ratings for your expensive new fresh-from-pay-TV series come back as ‘disappointing’ it will have nothing to do with the quality of the show. And virtually nothing to do with whether it was on at 8.30 or 9.30 pm. It will be because you fuckwits have made it unwatchable!

So make your next executive decision the only good one possible: sack yourselves.

Yours sincerely,

Irate Ex-viewer

Update: SGU pulled after just 3 eps! That’s even worse than Channel 9’s treatment of Fringe fans, who were furious when it was pulled after just a few weeks. (They eventually brought it back, messed around with the episode order, then pulled it again!)

Surprise, surprise, SGU rated poorly on Monday with just 487,000 viewers. Yeah, Ten execs, you succeeded in driving away your audience!

This shows just how crap a concept the Australian ‘non-ratings season’ is. Officially, the networks don’t poll ratings over the summer. But in reality they obviously watch them like a hawk – they just don’t let the advertisers in on the results! On Boxing Day 2003, Ten got a shock from viewing figures of 2.4m for World Idol – as the SMH succinctly put it “viewers don't disappear in summer; they wait for a program they can give a damn about.”

So advertisers get treated as badly by the commercial networks as the viewers. Free market not really working out for us in TV Land, I think it’s safe to say!