The Logie award winning, almost one year old show beat all competition in the 7pm timeslot last night in total viewers and all demographics. 1.11 million viewers watched nationally, the most viewers the show has received since its premiere week. Earlier this week it also pushed the million mark.

MasterChef following 7pm obviously helps but the show had already added at least 100,000 regular viewers before the MC juggernaut this year. Hopefully the trend continues, having watched every single episode of the show thanks to the magic of the IQ, I can say its been an uphill struggle but the show has turned itself around into a show you truly enjoy watching.

In this post, Rove addresses the status of ‘The 7pm Project’.

“Ultimately it’s biggest problem was, it was really heavily pushed as a launch when it was meant to be, maybe a bit more of a ‘lets ease it in’, when it was first pitched to us as something that we were going to try and get up and happening.”

The problem, McManus said was that nobody really knew what the show was going to be.

“and… I think the biggest problem it had was everybody thought they knew what the show was going to be… and it wasn’t what they thought it was going to be”

I asked whether people thought it was going to be similar to ‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart’?

“…well, yes some people thought it was going to be The Daily Show, some people thought it was going to be… just a very newsy show, but with comedians talking about it, I mean everyone had a different idea. So then when it wasn’t that, they just went ‘well I don’t know what it is and I don’t get it’ and they sort of went away”.

On it’s current status and whether it is safe….

“Where its at now, is where it was expected to start and you’re always going to do very well when you launch off the back of the highest rating show in television history [laughs] in this country, outside of major sporting events, so the good thing is at the moment, you know it’ll be round, just again sometimes I think… people sometimes, arm chair experts are a lot more vocal than they used to be, and you know we are about to celebrate 10 years and we weren’t doing all that good when we started”.

Subscribe to our RSS to keep up to date, more of the interview with Rove will be released over the coming week or so.

What did I think? Thanks for asking! Uneven but room to improve. I thought it was a respectable first outing, the team seems to gel fairly well.

The set is quite distracting, as is the shaky camera work in Ruby Rose’s segment. The shaky handheld camera effects were not needed and viewers usually find it nauseating and unnecessary. That needs to be dropped. The key (image) behind Ruby of Sydney should also be a little less distracting. Keep it still basically.

The content itself was fine, mostly light hearted entertainment-like topics, I hope they branch out to other types of stories too. Carrie was solid, although I was waiting the punchlines after the news stories.

Charlie needs to loosen up, the studio audience needs to wake up and be a little more vocal (no applause coming to and from breaks was a bit weird, as was the delayed applause for Julie) and Dave – well Dave was his normal self.

I was surprised by James Mathison, he is a good addition to the panel, although I have a feeling he won’t be there every night.

Overall it was a strong start, we will just have to wait to see what Australia thought of it. It’s back tomorrow and every Weeknight at 7pm on Network Ten.

Update: Ruby Rose clarifies what she calls the ‘drunk cameraman’.

Thanks to everyone who watched the 7pm project sorry about the “drunk camera man” during sienna it wasn’t us it was a junkit. Odd I know. X

Uploaded by RoveOnline, Courtesy Roving Enterprises/Network Ten