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Despite being subjected to a withering attack from critics and social media commentators, Warnie is being hailed as a win by Nine (which owns this masthead), with the network claiming the miniseries is “the most-watched new Australian drama of the year”.
Precisely how many competitors it has beaten out to claim that title, though, is unclear, given the paucity of new home-grown drama on free-to-air television, and the fact the streaming services – where the likes of Deadloch, The Clearing, Bump spin-off Year Of, and Wellmania have all debuted this year – generally do not release viewing numbers.
No balls-up: Nine has claimed Warnie, starring Alex Williams as Shane Warne, was a success.Credit: Nine
The two-part biopic of cricketer Shane Warne, which aired over two nights, drew an average overnight audience of 763,000 viewers nationally on Sunday (528,000 in the five-city metro market) and 611,000 (434,000 metro) on Monday night.
Those figures are likely to grow substantially over the next 28 days as broadcast video on demand (BVOD) and catch-up viewing adds to the tally. Nine claims an additional 62,000 watched the first part on live BVOD on Sunday, and 52,000 watched episode two on Monday.
The real measure of Warnie’s performance will be in how much the tail wags. But at first blush the controversial series – which the cricketer’s children had criticised for being rushed into production so soon after their father’s death last March – was a qualified success at best.
After a solid opening, the series suffered something of a middle-order collapse, shedding almost a quarter of its metro audience during Sunday’s broadcast. Monday’s second innings did much the same, though off a lower base.
On Sunday it was the fifth-most-watched program, behind only Dancing With The Stars (934,000 national viewers) and the news on Seven, Nine and the ABC.
But on Monday, it ranked 16, with Media Watch, MasterChef, The Chase, Have You Been Paying Attention? and even the nation’s longest-running remaining soapie, Home and Away, finishing ahead of it.
TV Tonight labelled some of the dramatic choices in the series “jarring”, with editor David Knox saying it “didn’t engage me as a non-cricketing viewer”. The Guardian’s Luke Buckmaster was far harsher, saying the decision to have Warne (played by Alex Williams) narrate from beyond the grave made it an “epic gabfest” with a tone akin to “a tipsy bloke at the pub talking your ear off”. The whole thing felt, he added, like it “has been hurried down the assembly line, without much thought put into it”.
On IMDb, the smattering of reviews from users range from “avoid this” (1 star out of 10) to “it’s not that bad” (6 stars) to a resoundingly positive “great show” (10 out of 10). That last comes from a user who has no other reviews and only registered with the site in May.
The harshest responses, though, were arguably on social media, where the show was savaged.
On Channel 9’s Facebook page, users criticised the series as “very ordinary”, saying it “looked cheap”, was “horrible to watch”, and calling it “disrespectful”.
On Twitter, the lack of physical similarity between Steve Waugh, Alan Border, Michael Clarke and the actors playing them drew ironic commentary. The casting of Noah Janssen in a minor role was singled out for particular disdain. “And guest starring Pepe Le Pew as Kevin Pietersen,” wrote one viewer.
Nine, though, is bullish about how the show has performed, and how much life it believes is in it yet.
“Over 1 million Australians have already watched Warnie episode one, with that figure expected to rise substantially over the coming weeks thanks to the exceptional demand on 9Now,” the network said in a statement on Tuesday, in which it claimed the BVOD audience for the first episode had risen to more than 113,000 and an encore screening had added another 141,000 viewers, for a total audience of 1.013 million viewers.
“Warnie has clearly resonated with viewers across Australia,” the network added. “Like the man himself, Warnie has been hugely popular, entertaining and thought-provoking.”
Contact the author at [email protected], follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin, and read more of his work here.
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