Ten’s yanking of The Biggest Loser from the Sunday night line up and replacing it with new episodes of Modern Family didn’t work. They could only manage 504,000 and 542,000 nationally for the two episodes last night – around 100,000 better than The Biggest Loser a week earlier. But that was no help in the end for Ten which has another weak week to contemplate. It was a weak 4th behind the ABC last week and had main channels shares on Friday and Saturday nights of 9.3% and 8.9% respectively. Its main channel share for all of last week was just 9.9%.

Last night’s results in the metros, regionals and nationals will bring a smile to faces of the embattled Seven management today. Nine’s will looked puzzled and Ten battered.

In fact Ten’s overall and main channel shares last night dipped on a week ago – 12.1% v 12.9% overall and 7.4% against 7.5% for the main channel. Another bad story for Ten was a 25% slide in the audience for the Grand Prix from Melbourne. The race averaged 959,000 yesterday – on March 20 in 2016, it averaged 1.16 million. In 2016 the podium presentation averaged 1.24 million, yesterday it averaged 712,000. Ten’s new US program, Bull could only manage 551,000 nationally, joining Homeland and This is Us on the foreign flop list. All this means the financial pain doesn’t improve. If Ten survives, the Grand Prix looks like a cost saving on those figures for yesterday’s race. It was simulcast on Foxtel where it was watched by 207,000 viewers.

Nine thought no doubt it would repeat last Sunday’s narrow it solid win over Seven with Married at First Sight, 60 Minutes and the news. As it was, Seven had a very clear win overall and in the main channels and My Kitchen Rules topped Married nationally by just 3,000 viewers, while Married topped in the metros by a larger 43,000. 

But 60 Minutes was crunched by Seven’s Sunday Night – 60 Minutes managed 979,000 nationally, Sunday Night, 2.36 million. Seven and Nine News all but tied in the metros and nationally Seven was 135,000 viewers in front. Seven though showed more smarts in its programming by repeating a special on the Anita Cobby abduction and murder from several decades ago in Sydney. It ran for two hours from 9.30pm and averaged 690,000 viewers and after Vera ended on the ABC at 10pm (1.14 million nationally), the special dominated viewing and pushed Seven to a clear win. 

The remake of Lethal Weapon continues to fade on Nine – just 470,000 people at 9.10pm  

In the regions, Seven News was again top with 544,000, with MKR on 528,000, Married at First Sight was 3rd with 484,000, Sunday Night was 4th with 454,000, and The Nine/NBN News 6.30 was 5th with 422,000.

In the morning, Insiders with 505,000 again was the most watched program, thought their chat about last week’s Newspoll looks a little funny after the Fairfax poll this morning.  — Read the rest on the Crikey website