Telecinco shakes its summer grill after its minimum audience

Telecinco is making the month of August long. The Mediaset chain fired its flagship program, ‘Survivors’, a little over three weeks ago, and immediately launched its summer bets to hook an audience that turns off the television in summer or looks for alternatives on other channels and platforms. From the communication group they decided to renew their ‘prime time’ with new formats and returns of great past successes, but the viewers were not seduced. The result: Telecinco closed its prime time last week (from 10:00 p.m.) below the psychological barrier of 10% every day of the week, a fact that has caused the first movements of the grid that could continue in the next days of not improving the audience.

The first of the changes affected ‘Tonight I win’, a contest presented by Christian Gálvez and Carolina Cerezuela where two groups of celebrities face each other to overcome challenges. The chain, which produces this space in collaboration with Bulldog TV, brought back popular characters such as Edu Soto, Patricia Montero, Belinda Washington or Miriam Díaz-Aroca, among other contestants, on television. In its last installment, it had a low 6.8% audience share and 584,000 viewers, which is why Telecinco decided yesterday to send the format to the ‘late night’ slot and replace it with the film ‘An exceptional gift’ for just three weeks after the premiere.

What seemed like an expected return for viewers did not translate, however, in great audience numbers. Telecinco also premiered this month the sequel to the mythical ‘CSI: Vegas’, being one of the highlights of the channel’s summer offer as it was, twenty years ago, the most watched foreign fiction in the history of the chain. The return of Gil Grissom was settled with 9.7% and just over a million viewers, a figure that plummeted to 8.1% of ‘share’ in its second week. Given these data, Mediaset has decided to accelerate the end of the season, with the broadcast of three chapters on Monday nights. However, the strategy did not work either, as the last installment fell to a 6.7% share.

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Nor is the bet on Wednesdays obtaining the expected results. The Spanish adaptation of ‘Idol Kids’, presented by Jesús Vázquez, fell to 7.1% of ‘share’ and stayed at 606,000 viewers, while the Italian fiction ‘Blanca’ also lost follow-up last week, with 8, 1% and 707,000 followers, despite the fact that it premiered on Thursday, August 4, as the audience leader with 11.8%. In addition, the compilations of ‘Friday Deluxe’ (7.4% and 481,000), ‘Let yourself be loved’ (8.7% and 595,000) and the Sunday movie ‘Disappeared’ (7.5% and 693,000) also played during the weekend holiday week of August 15.

Despite being a period in which the channels bet on smaller products that have no place in the high season and where television consumption falls to lows due to the summer holidays, the truth is that, if the trend continues, Telecinco would close August with its worst data since 1990, the year in which it began its broadcasts and was still unknown to the general public.

So far this month, the channel has accumulated an average audience share of 11%, that is, 2.1 points less than in July, compared to the 13.2 share averaged by its main competitor, Antena 3, whose commitment to Turkish serials continues to give him great joy. For September, yes, in Mediaset they will turn to recover lost ground with an ambitious proposal that will go through new editions of ‘Got Talent’, ‘The island of temptations’, own fictions such as ‘Scandal, portrait of an obsession’ or the reality television format ‘Nightmare in Paradise’, with celebrities living with animals on a farm.