Mainly a list for me as I’ve been out of action for the last four days or so (without going into details it has so far involved an overnight Hospital visit and now my electronic scales don’t recognise me and will involve a camera in the next few days) but Likely Of Interest to you as well:

• De Mol in Thailand officially starts next week on Sunday 23rd on Flanders’ Play4, but I believe the contestants are getting revealed on a special Club De Mol tonight. For all De Mol chat I direct you to #molchat in the Discord, which is where any English subs will likely turn up.
• Jeopardy! UK series 2 starts tomorrow (Monday) at the new time of 3pm. The first series was very dull. A clip going around suggests the new series might be a bit more… kinetic? They’ve got a buzzer sound anyway. Also a seventh category for each board and Paul Farrer music beds. It’s more stuff, but is it more stodge? Discussion post is here, you might as well use it.
• Last One Laughing UK starts on Amazon Prime on Thursday. Jimmy Carr challenges a fairly stacked cast of comics to stay in a room and not laugh. Amazed it’s taken this long for the Documental format to happen here given previous international success really. A Show Discussion post will go up in due course.
• 99 to Beat starts Saturday at 6pm on ITV1, ten minutes into the first Gladiators semi-final which feels like absolutely nonsense scheduling. We’ll see how that works out for everybody, they’ll be a Show Discussion post in due course. FOTB Tom F (who is also a contestant) is writing some brilliant pieces about the Dutch show that’s been running for ages, and the Flemish original, on his blog.
• Joko and Klaas’ Ein sehr gutes Quiz (mit hoher Gewinnsumme) (A Very Good Quiz (With A Very High Prize)) starts a four episode run next Saturday night as well on Pro7 and we’ll probably watch the first one in the Discord but I’m not committing to more than that as there are too many lengthy German quizzes flying about and I like to do other things occasionally. This was successfully piloted as part of J and K’s Pro7 24-hour takeover day and it looks like it’s going to keep lots of the same things – it’s live, it will travel the country, they won’t reveal the location until the morning of the show, people can turn up and audition that afternoon. Premise: three people work as a team answering multiple choice questions, but one person must buzz and be responsible for the answer. If they’re right, the team carries on. If they’re wrong, they’ve eliminated themselves and get replaced by the next person in the queue. Nobody buzzes in after 90 seconds? All three are replaced. Whoever buzzes in with the correct answer for Q25 wins €100,000. LIVE.
• Stretching the definition of “in the next week or so” Million Dollar Secret with Peter Serafinowicz starts on Netflix Wednesday 26th, looks like an amalgam of lots of different shows but despite that also looks like it might be quite fun.

The ITV Spring brochure is out and Genius Game is in it, so that’s finally coming out, and we think 99 to Beat is starting soon. There’s no sign of Fortune Hotel 2 (the first one went out in May) so presumably that’s going out at a later date. But something picked up on is that there’s going to be a The 1% Club Soccer Aid Special, and it will have 100 celebrities in it.

This unique edition of the show sees 100 famous faces pushing their logic and common sense to the max – contestants looking to make it into the prestigious 1% Club include Paddy McGuinness, Tommy Fury, Jill Scott, Max Whitlock, Mark Pougatch, Kimberley Wyatt, Jake Quickenden, Iain Stirling, Gemma Atkinson, Mark Chapman, Neil Ruddock, Tony Bellew, Brian McFadden, Amber Gill, AITCH, and many, many more.

Can any show beat that?

TV Zone reporting this evening that the host of upcoming ITV Daytime quiz Time is Money is none other than Sara Davies off of Dragons’ Den, a leftfield choice, but potentially quite a good one, in the past she’s certainly shown a lot of interest in the more gamey-entertainment ventures – this doesn’t guarantee she’ll be a good host but does suggest she’ll have a reasonable understanding going in of what’s required. Time is Money is a show where you start off with a load of cash and then have to answer questions correctly against the clock to keep hold of it which on paper doesn’t sound very new, it’s Quizzy Ant and Dec’s Push the Button, but we live in hope it’ll be a fun addition to the daytime line up.

Fans of walls of text will be happy that Jeopardy UK is back March 17th apparently.

Do you like DRAMA? Do you like CHESS? Well the dramatically titled Chess Masters: The Endgame (that’s an absolutely ridiculous subtitle for a first series, unless they’re also banking on it being the last) begins March 10th at 8pm on BBC in Only Connect‘s slot. Players will do battle across chess puzzles and it will end with a game of chess. An EDITED game of chess mind, it sounds as though they’re going to be showing the matches in full on iPlayer. But if you’ve just watched the highlights of as ten minutes a side chess game, and why would you just watch the highlights of a ten minutes a side chess game, are you really going to go back and check the whole thing out afterwards? Basically it feels as though this really ought to be a cheap and easy way to fill an hour slot and they’re going to have to rush to fit everything into 28 minutes. As ever, we hope the swing connects but we live in fear.

Finally Davina’s doing Stranded on Honeymoon Island, people who have never met each other marry and then have to survive living on a desert island. It’s Married At First Sight On A Desert Island. I get why the BBC are trying it, MAFS is a Channel 4 sized success on E4, but you know how some things just don’t feel very BBC? I fear this will end up being one of them.

Alright, the new stats for the back half of 2024’s Netflix viewing came out this afternoon and it occurs that we somehow missed the stats for the first half of the year so I thought I’d just take a look at the stats for 2024 put together. Squid Game Season 2 topped the back half of 2024 with 619.9m hrs viewed in just the final week of the year, an effective viewership of 86.5m viewers (interestingly the first episode made Top 50 BARB in the UK, but none of the other ones did). It looks like Bridgerton Series 3 was the most watched TV show throughout the whole of last year with 907.1m hrs, an effective viewership of just shy of 112.9m viewers – effective viewership just being the amount of hours watched divided by the runtime – this doesn’t account for people who give up on a series or people who watch multiple times.

However what we’re interested in is 2024’s batch of unscripted. So let’s take a look shall we? Figures are date of release, hours, effective viewership across the year. I’ve sprinkled in some unscripted non-game stuff and of interest stuff as well for texture, but we’ll stick to English language versions of formats in the main unless a number looks particularly interesting. It’s just in date order as I work my way down the lists. Not all shows are available worldwide. Runs from 1st Jan 2024 to 31st Dec 2024.

The Trust Season 1: 10/1/24 52.2m hrs, 7.5m
Love is Blind Season 6: 14/2/24 316.3m hrs, 22.1m
Physical 100 Season 2: 19/3/24 135.0m hrs, 13.0m
Is It Cake S3: 29/3/24 70.7m hrs, 12.3m
The Circle S6: 17/4/24 53.2m hrs, 5.0m
Don’t Hate the Player/Mauvais Jouers S1: 17/4/24 13.9m hrs, 2.0m
Selling the OC S3: 3/5/24 39.1m hrs, 8.4m
The 8 Show: 17/5/24 110.0m, 15.8m
Buying London S1: 5/22/24 22.2m hrs, 5.3m
Agents of Mystery S1: 18/6/24 8.2m hrs, 1.8m
The Mole S2: 28/6/24 45.7m hrs, 5.9m
Too Hot To Handle S6: 19/7/24 101.1m hrs, 11.0m
The Influencer S1: 6/8/24 23.2m hrs, 3.1m
Love is Blind UK S1: 7/8/24, 141.8m hrs, 12.1m
KAOS: 29/8/24, 135.2m hrs, 20.3m
Outlast S2: 4/9/24, 49m hrs, 7.4m
Selling Sunset S8: 6/9/24 78.3m hrs, 12.2m
The Circle S7: 11/9/24, 39.1m hrs, 3.5m
Love is Blind S7: 2/10/24, 220.9m hrs, 14.4m
Culinary Class Wars S1: 17/9/24 227.9m hrs, 17.2m
Jake Paul vs Mike Tyson: 15/11/24 235.7m hrs, 48.9m
Zombieverse: New Blood: 19/11/24 8.9m hrs, 1.3m
Is It Cake? Holiday S1: 28/11/24 26.1m hrs, 9.7m
The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On S3: 69.7m hrs, 7.5m
The Two Christmas Gamedays (25/12/24) both did around 14.3m viewers

Phew, what do we learn from all that? Clearly the Netflix relationship/dating shows are still massively successful, somehow we’ve completely slept on Culinary Class Wars – massive numbers for that! It’s Cooking Physical 100, if we’d known that at the time we’d have watched it. Kaos, the Greek myth drama with Jeff Goldblum that we liked, got canned with 20m viewers effective. Harsh. The Mole US is low-mid tier reality successful. The Influencer and Agents of Mystery deserve more.

Looking at some previous shows we’ve enjoyed, The Devil’s Plan added another 16m taking its lifetime total up to 88.4m hours, 6.7m viewers (Series two coming soon), Squid Game: The Challenge added 45.3m to go up to 315.9m hrs to go up to a lifetime viewership of 38.7m. Streaming quiz sensation Cheat with Danny Dyer added another 0.5m hrs to go up to 8m hrs total. So there we are.