Network Ten have this morning announced changes to their morning program line-up, with The Circle rolling away as the major casualty. That will be the last awful shape-related joke, I promise.*
The morning chat show hosted by Yumi Stynes and Gorgi Coghlan will be replaced with mainly American content, including daytime talk show The Talk, Ten’s morning news, Entertainment Tonight and its spin-off The Insider. Meaning you’ll be able to get 75% of your necessary daily intake of bowel movement-inducing bullshit Brangelina roughage before midday! Everybody wins!**
Surprisingly, Ten’s breakfast show with an agenda, Breakfast, was only cut by half an hour, which is a shame for anyone who has ever sat through an episode of Breakfast. Say Breakfast one more time.
Hopefully this doesn’t mean reduced Shaun Micallef content on early morning TV. On second thoughts, he probably isn’t welcome there anymore.
Axing The Circle will result in an untold number of redundancies for those working both on and off-camera, a large number of them women. While it failed to draw viewers in the hundreds of thousands in what is arguably one of the worst possible time-slots for a show, and even though a significant amount of its content revolved around selling Ab-King Pros and steam mops, it was a surprisingly well-liked, locally produced live television show that still managed to draw in an audience that almost nearly doubled that of its Breakfast counterpart (on Thursday last week The Circle drew 62,000 viewers and Breakfast drew 38,000). Surely the fact that your total audience increases significantly after one show ends and the other begins is a pretty telling indication of which show you should keep, no?
Heck, they even won the 2011 Silver Logie for Most Popular Light Entertainment Program! They literally won a popularity contest within their target demographic! Doesn’t a Silver Logie for Most Popular Light Entertainment Program at least count for something in the backwaters of Australian TV!? Apparently not.
In getting rid of The Circle due to “tight fiscal control and cost discipline”, a show with a small but an all of a sudden very vocal support network, in favour of keeping Breakfast and its highly paid host, purchasing the rights to and recycling American trash television content and continuing to direct funding into producing shows like The Shire (and to a lesser extent, Being Lara Bingle) not only makes very little sense but is a sad indictment of the current state of Australian television. Or at least Channel 10.
Via Mumbrella
*Sorry, I had to do this
**Nobody wins.
Photo: The original cast of The Circle at the 2011 Logies by Scott Barbour for Getty Images Entertainment/Stringer
