No Lost and the Nine Network found its way to a win in the ratings last night, but Seven News again beat Nine News nationally and in Sydney, while Today Tonight also accounted for A Current Affair.

Nine
won with a 31.0% share to Seven on 29.3%, Ten on 21.2%, the ABC on
13.8% and SBS on 4.7%. Nine won in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, but
lost in Adelaide and Perth.

The absence of Lost on Seven saw Nine’s beleaguered ER emerge with 350,000 or so more viewers and top the list as the most watched program nationally. Seven News was second, 5,000 people ahead of Nine and 18,000 ahead in Sydney.

Seven’s My Restaurant Rules was fourth, followed by Home and Away, Today Tonight, ACA, the repeat of Frasier, Seven’s The Amazing Race and then Getaway, which is stuck on 1.1 million viewers. It finished behind My Restaurant on Seven, once again.

With the football season well under way, the NRL and AFL Footy Shows
combined audience topped a million viewers (1.131 million). Eddie and
his troops did well in Melbourne, topping the most watched list with
471,000 viewers, but in Sydney and Brisbane the NRL show did very
badly. It finished fourteenth in Sydney and twentieth in Brisbane and
has reached the endangered species zone in its present form. Stand by
for changes!

And don’t doubt Nine will make them – it’s just yanked the Friends spin-off Joey from the endangered species list and put it in the reject bin. After two months on air at 7:30pm on Monday nights in the old Friends
timeslot, the program, despite all those gushing comments by Nine
programmers, led by chief, Michael Healy, is no more. It’s been
replaced by the UK Super Nanny program, that appeared on Sunday night in the 6.30pm timeslot and it’s being replaced this Sunday night by the return of Backyard Blitz.

That means Nine has now been forced to move two of its new 2005 programs, Starstruck and now Joey. Rival Ten has already removed the local version of Queer Eyefor the Straight Guy and is counting down the weeks to the end of the ailing X-Factor.

Meanwhile
Nine will put to air mid year a pilot of a possible new series that
will be produced by Zapruder’s Other Films, the company behind Andrew
Denton’s Enough Rope on the ABC.