It’s a real good news/bad news scenario this afternoon in the Australian TV business: Good if you’re a big fan of huge budget reality TV series, bad i if you’re a fan of partway decent weekend current affairs programming.
Following on from this afternoon’s revelation that Big Brother is officially being rebooted for Australian screens in 2020, ending weeks of speculation, it’s now been confirmed that the network behind the reboot is Channel Seven, and they’ve already made some big moves in order to accommodate it.
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Seven has been confirmed by industry blog TV Blackbox as the network behind the rebooted version of the enduring franchise, which is being pushed forward by production company Endemol Shine Australia.
The only problem with that being a show like Big Brother requires a decently hefty budget and a primetime timeslot for live eviction shows. And Seven has found both of those things today by officially axing its leading investigative current affairs show, Sunday Night.
The network announced this morning that the cornerstone of their Sunday evening programming block will not return to the air in 2020, leaving a gaping hole that network officials apparently will be filling with Big Brother live eviction specials, among other things.
It’s been reported that Endemol Shine had been pushing the format locally for a number of months, but both Ten and Nine (who wholly owns this publication but refuses to tell me if the eye patch version of Richard Wilkins was some sort of soap opera evil twin scenario or nah) are said to have passed.
So there you go. Big Brother‘s coming back, and it’s Channel Seven doing the dirty work on it this time around.
No word yet on who the network has in mind to host the series, but my one and only suggestion is simple: Roy & HG.
Not necessarily as an eviction night host, but more as a weird reality TV revival of The Dream.
Am I crazy? Maybe. But consider the following counterpoint: Maybe I’m not.
