According to media journalist Jordi Versteegden, the flop of the Friday night show Avastars is extremely sensitive at SBS 6. “My questions are always answered very slowly.”
John de Mol has worked on it for more than twenty years and even sat at the desk of Shownieuws to talk about it: Avastars, the program in which digital dolls dance and sing battle with each other. Now that show is finally on television, but it turns out to be a TV monstrosity and no dog is watching it.
Sensitive
Normally, such a show would have disappeared from the tube long ago, but in this case the producer is also the broadcaster’s boss, and then things are just a bit different. John pays, so John decides. And that is why the television viewer has to zap around SBS 6 for two more Friday evenings.
You really notice that this is very sensitive with John de Mol’s Talpa, says media journalist Jordi Versteegden at the Telegraaf site. “It is striking that I have been contacting Talpa’s communications department for a number of weeks and that there is actually a very slow response to questions about Avastars.”
Prestige project
What does Jordi e-mail to Talpa? “For example, this week I asked them for a careful look back at this eventful first season of Avastars and that is not happening. They are very clear: ‘We will broadcast the semi-final next Friday and the grand final the following Friday.’”
Strange, he thinks. “If this trend continues with 117 thousand viewers now, they will probably have 100 thousand viewers this week and the final will have less than 100 thousand viewers. I don’t think it’s really worth broadcasting that, but well: it has become a kind of prestige project.”
Mega press day
It will be difficult for John to accept that this has flopped, Jordi thinks. “I keep thinking back to that gigantic press day I was able to attend a few weeks ago. It was really grander than grand how it was set up there with a studio that they had converted into the Avastars studio especially for that press day.”
If something fails so mercilessly, he thinks it is logical that he has questions about it. “There was so much money in it and a program that then flops so badly naturally requires an evaluation.”
Too sober
Does Jordi expect John to be able to sell this program to Asian countries? “I wonder. If you put a program here for 117,000 viewers, then I can’t imagine that they are eager to bring that program there in Asia.”
This will never score in the Netherlands, even if it doesn’t look so dated, Jordi concludes. “I think we are too sober for that.”