Australian viewers have officially fallen in love with MasterChef again.
Last year, the reality cooking show achieved its worst grand final result ever: just 1.07 million viewers in the five major capital cities.
Last night’s final – won by Victorian Brent Owens – drew an audience more than 50 per cent bigger, giving the Ten network its best prime-time ratings in almost three years.
About 1.66 million people watched MasterChef in the metropolitan areas; a figure that climbs to 2.07 million when regional areas are included.
Thanks also to its Glasgow Commonwealth Games coverage, the Ten channels snared a massive 35.2 per cent share of the audience – leaving Seven (22.4 per cent) and Nine (21.5 per cent) in the dust. The ABC channels had 17.2 per cent while SBS took just 3.8 per cent.
It's now standard for networks to measure the ‘‘winner announcement’’ portion of their reality finales separately, allowing them to hog more than one position on the nightly rankings and ensure a higher spot on the ‘‘most watched shows of the year’’ lists.
Last night, 1.7 million metropolitan viewers saw Owens take the crown (rising to 2.15 million including regional areas).
Interestingly, the ‘‘peak audience’’ – the moment at which the most eyeballs are watching – did not occur during the winner announcement segment, but in the earlier part of the episode. A combined metropolitan and regional audience of 2.55 million were tuned in at this point.
Naturally, MasterChef’s ‘‘winner announcement’’ segment took the No. 1 spot for the evening, followed by the finale episode.
In a worrying sign for Nine, MasterChef smashed its main rival, The Block Glasshouse, which was pushed all the way to ninth spot with just 926,00 metropolitan viewers.
Nine will hope the program recovers tonight when it competes against Seven’s The X Factor and Ten’s Save with Jamie.
MasterChef has enjoyed its best ratings in two years this season, which industry observers attribute to the axing of its four spin-offs (which were overwhelming viewers) and its ‘‘return to its roots’’ (moving away from the confected conflict of its rivals).
mlallo@fairfaxmedia.com.au
