No worries for the Seven Network last night. It rested Lost for the night to allow for the two-hour premiere of a new series of The Amazing Race, and still won, a development that should worry the Nine Network and Ten, to a lesser extent.

The good performances of Nine News and A Current Affair on Wednesday night were reversed, and Home and Away continued to blitz them to be the most watched show for a third night in a row. The Amazing Race attracted an average of 1.27 million viewers over two hours from 8:40pm, which is why the Network ended up winning the night. Lost usually
attracts around 1.8 million viewers so the loss of audience appears
large, but the smaller audience was spread over a longer period of
time.

Nine had ER and the Footy Shows from 8:30pm to 11pm or so and The Amazing Race out-rated both of those for the two hours it was on air. The Footy Shows
didn’t set the house on fire. The AFL program in Melbourne lifted its
audience to a solid 416,000 average, but it’s been as high as 479,000
at the start of the season proper. The NRL show in Sydney and Brisbane
again under-performed, watched by 261,400 people and 154,800 people
respectively.

Home and Away was the top show with 1.432 million people, Today Tonight was second with 1.40 million, then Seven Mews with 1.323 million, Nine News with 1.279 million, then The Amazing Race, ER, the repeat of Law and Order on Ten, My Restaurant Rules and two episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond (one new, one a repeat) were 9th and 10th.

Seven News beat Nine by 44,000 nationally and won in Sydney but lost only 51,000 in Melbourne the closest finish for some weeks. TT beat ACA by more than 300,000 viewers, winning big in Sydney and Melbourne. The Sydney margin in favour of TT was a huge 140,000 plus.

Overall Seven won with a share of 30.4% to Nine on 27.5%, Ten on 22.6%, the ABC on 16.0% and SBS on 3.4%.