Australia clearly has an insatiable appetite for reality TV dating series, with the new season of Farmer Wants A Wife dominating ratings in its timeslot.
The show, which pairs five male farmers with single women keen to find love on the land, topped last Sunday’s timeslot, despite the fact I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here! crowned Skye Wheatley its winner that night.
The show boasted a national total TV audience figure of 1.06m (its biggest number so far this year), beating Lego Masters (795,000), and from 7.30pm the I’m A Celebrity finale (749,000) and Call the Midwife (561,000).
By Tuesday, FWAW was still strong, attracting 1.01m in national total TV audience share, and also topping entertainment, with 7:30 (691,000), Lego Masters (689,000) and MasterChef Australia (649,000) locked in a three-way battle for the remaining viewers.
The strong ratings for FWAW’s fourteenth season come off the back of a stellar year for the series in 2023, when it reached an impressive 8.5 million viewers.
That year it attracted its biggest-ever audience: across Seven and streaming platform 7plus, the 2023 season averaged 1.17 million total viewers with the overnight total audience up 16 per cent from 2022.
The series’ most recent episode was up seven per cent nationally year-on-year, and in Perth it was up 14 per cent year-on-year, 57.5 per cent ahead of Lego Masters and 133.3 per cent ahead of MasterChef.
The success follows that of Nine’s recent reality romance blockbuster Married At First Sight. Its finale achieved a total TV national reach of 2.75m, and a national average audience of 1.73m.
Tonight’s episode of Farmer Wants A Wife promises to be another big one as the farmers and their ladies let their hair down at the Country Ball.