On the Inside

By | May 28, 2024
3 Comments

Something potentially quite interesting coming up, popular Youtube troupe Sidemen will be running their own reality show on Youtube from June 2nd to June 9th, Inside, where ten celebs will stay in a house for week to vie for a prize of up to £1m. Decisions, challenges and eliminations will determine if the pot goes up or down, and the winner of the final head-to-head wins the lot.

It will be interesting to see what bypassing the traditional TV model does for this, the group have a massive following and it’s not the first time they’ve dipped their toes into this sort of water. Their main Youtube channel is here.

Netflix Stats and Chill July-Dec 23

By | May 23, 2024
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Earlier I was thinking to myself “hmm, we must be due the next tranche of Netflix stats quite soon,” spookily enough they were released an hour earlier. Spooky. You can download them from here if you want.

Like last time I have to wrack my brains a bit to remember what of interest was released in the back half of last year, and it’s worth pointing out that these numbers only take that window into account, so something released middle of December will have little chance to accumulate compared to something released 1st July. Here are the highlights from the first set of numbers that were released for Jan-June 2023. Let’s have a look and see what the new numbers bring – of new interest is “amount of viewers” which is just the hours watched divided by the series runtime, we can’t know how many people dropped off a series, but if you’ve watched most of it you’re probably watching all of it. Also this is *just* the TV shows list, films have their own page.

Squid Game Challenge (released 22/11/23) – 270.6m hrs, 33.1m viewers
Making Squid Game: The Challenge (6/12/23) – 1.5m hours, 3m viewers
The Devil’s Plan (26/9/23) – 72.4m hrs, 5.4m viewers
Zombieverse S1 (8/8/23) – 29.6m hrs, 4m viewers
Is It Cake Too? (30/6/23) – 98.5m hrs, 16.8m viewers
Is She The Wolf? S1 (11/6/23) – 6.8m, 800k viewers
Muscles and Mayhem (that American Glads doc) (28/6/23) – 19.3m hrs, 5.4m viewers
Too Hot to Handle S5 (14/7/23) – 111.4m hrs, 13.5m viewers
The Big Nailed It! Baking Challenge S1 (4/8/23) – 28.5m hrs, 3.7m viewers
The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On S2 (23/8/23) – 76.8m hrs, 10.4m viewers
Love is Blind S5 (22/9/23) – 155.7m, 14.1m
Single’s Inferno S3 (12/12/23) – 49.5m hrs, 5.6m viewers

What counts as ‘good’? There are of course different expectations for different shows, and of course some shows on the list will have a time advantage over others. However as an *extremely quick and dirty* metric, I’ve stripped the spreadsheet to a) only Netflix originals, b) must be available globally, c) must have come out between July and end of September, i.e. the first three months of the period.

There are 97 shows that fit that criteria. The 49th show, the median on the list in terms of hours viewed is in fact The Big Nailed It Baking Challenge Season 1, released 4/8/23, 28.5m hrs, 7:48 run time, 3.7m viewers. The median in terms of “amount of views” is Kohrra: Season 1, released 15/7/23, 30.9m hrs, 6.4m viewers. The mean average for the selection, rounded to three sig figs, is 68.6m hrs, 9.87m viewers. 19 shows recorded over 100,000,000 hrs.

We can also look at what was featured in the previous highlights and see what they’ve added in the subsequent six months:

Physical 100 S1 added 22.7m hrs to the 235.0m it got last time.
Siren: Survive the Island added 3.8m to the 11.7m it got last time
Cheat S1 added 1.0m to the 6.5m it got last time.
Too Hot to Handle Germany S1 added 8.4m to the 42.6m it got last time.
Love is Blind S4 added 44m to the 229.7m it got last time.
Dance 100 added 2.2m to the 16.6m it got last time.

Is there anything interesting from the latest stats we’ve missed? Let us know in the comments.

Too Much Mole

By | May 16, 2024
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The latest Flemish series is just about finished (bar the reunion on Sunday, which is always entertaining) and normally that’s the end of Mole season for the year and although it’s probably not quite a top three season for me there has certainly been a lot of Sicilian based messing around and some fantastic and hilarious ideas. But it’s not the end of Mole season this year! And specifically June 28th not one but *two* new seasons are launching.

The one that’s going to be easiest to watch is series two of Netflix Mole, this time round hosted by Ari Shapiro from NPR. If there’s one thing you can guarantee with Netflix Mole, it will certainly be the format of The Mole.

More interestingly, Wie is De Mol? in The Netherlands is doing its first civilian season in over twenty years and it’s going to be a streaming exclusive, hosted by previous contestant Hila Noorzai. It’s on NPO Start, last time I tried to watch NPO online it was ungeoblocked, but I don’t know if that’s still the case and it stands to reason that with this being a streaming exclusive they might not be quite so happy with translated Youtube uploads but we’ll see what transpires translation wise. Also we *think* it’s the first season with a new showrunner after the previous one declared the series just gone out to be his last. And it’s set in Oman. And the advert looks great. Two episodes every Friday.

These will largely be discussed in the Discord nearer the time.

In other news, The 8 Show, Netflix next Gameshow of Death K-Drama, launches on Netflix tomorrow.

Show Discussion: The Fortune Hotel

By | May 12, 2024
27 Comments

Monday-Thursdays, 9pm, also repeated around 11:45pm and 3am
ITV1

Thanks to The Traitors, we’re probably in for a full raft of strategic reality games where people hold some sort of secret but we as the audience know everything and the contestants don’t. For The Traitors, our privileged position works, conversations aren’t just conversations, they are loaded conversations and the results are dramatic and funny and the strategy is long-term. Here Tuesday Child are hoping the same magic works with, effectively, Find the Lady.

Ten couples check into Stephen Mangan’s Fortune Hotel and are handed a briefcase. One of them contains £250,000, eight are apparently empty, one of them contains an “Early Checkout”. They will do challenges and the night ends up with a case swapping party in Lady Luck’s Bar (I would presume doing best in the challenge means getting to swap a case last but I don’t know). Keep hold of the money, avoid the Early Checkout. It feels like the game is not so much having the money as avoiding the elimination, so with nine suitcases effective victories I’m not entirely sure “we know everything” is going to have quite the same cache. I’m hoping there’s some nuance that’s not coming through with the press releases.

We’ll see though, ITV have gone quite big on this, it almost seems a shame to have wasted a big sunny getaway resort just as the UK is beginning to bask in a load of sunshine. I’m afraid because this is peak period for my actual real life job I’m not going to get to watch this as it goes out, I’ll be playing catch-up, but I look forward to reading your comments below.

Show Discussion: Double the Money

By | May 8, 2024
8 Comments

Thursday, Fridays various, 8pm,
Channel 4

Channel 4 take on the BBC’s successful Enterprise Thursdays block with a new reality gameshow. Sue Perkins gives couples £250 seed money which they have to double within a time limit to stay in the game, then they must keep redoubling until presumably one team remain standing who win… some money. To make things harder, you can’t use the same method in a later round.

The advert where there are loads of people standing at podiums whilst Perkins goes “did you… double the money?” already feels like quite a tedious moment of tension and it hasn’t even started yet, you should already have an idea surely. Still we may get some entertaining side-hustle ideas. I presume starting an OnlyFans is out.

We’re going to have to watch the first episode over the weekend but if you’ve watched it let us know what you thought about it in the comments.

Edit: Thanks to Gameshow Herodotus Daniel Hurst, the schedule for this is Thursday, then Friday the next day, then the following Friday, so best of luck following that.