The Bachelor’s sinking ship has reached a new low, as Home and Away has surpassed it as the most viewed entertainment programme in the ratings.
Instead of watching the reality dating programme on Thursday night, fans were more interested in seeing the drama unfold at Summer Bay.
According to TV Blackbox, the long-running soap, which airs three episodes on Thursday nights, garnered 602,000 viewers.
On The Bachelor, Jimmy Nicholson made the all-important local visits with his top four girls, but Channel 10 failed to draw in the crowds.
It was only viewed by 470,000 people in the five-city metro, a far cry from the reality show’s prime, when it drew over a million viewers.
The once-dominant reality programme has been dogged by rumours that it would be cancelled as its numbers continue to plummet, with season nine averaging just 421,000 metro viewers per night.
Channel 10 refutes the allegations. Despite the fact that the programme continues to have the lowest ratings in the franchise’s eight-year history, The Bachelor is being cancelled.
The show’s existence, according to a trustworthy source, is in peril as viewers divert their focus to other reality dating shows.
If Brooke Blurton’s forthcoming season of The Bachelorette does not see a big increase in ratings, the show would ‘inevitably’ be terminated, they claimed.
Abbie Chatfield, 26, of the Bachelor franchise, recently shared her opinion on why this season’s ratings are so low.
She claimed that the failure was not due to Jimmy’s fault, but rather to the issue of casting two dozen ladies remotely through Zoom.
‘If I’m being honest – Channel 10 could kill me for this – but maybe it’s [because] Covid damaged the casting process,’ she told Jimmy and Nath on Hit Hobart on Tuesday.
She also stated that the show was “slow to start,” which she feels led to viewers turning out after the first few episodes.
