A historic moment: it could be that the enormous success of Boerzoekt Vrouw is a thing of the past. The new season has gotten off to a very disappointing start. “Shocking!”
It has been on the air for nineteen years: Farmer Wants a Woman. But is Yvon Jaspers constantly running through the screen with a pitchfork, is that what the viewer is still waiting for? The viewing pleasure might just be over, because the new season was really disappointing last night. Really average viewing figures.
Rating hooligan
The television bosses keep the scores secret these days – nice North Korean, they try to keep ratings flops under wraps – but luckily we still have ratings hooligan Tina Nijkamp. The former boss of SBS 6, like hundreds of other prominent figures, has access to the scores and she posts them in her Instagram stories every morning.
Tina now reveals that very few people watched Farmer Wants a Woman yesterday. “The question everyone has this morning is: what did Farmer Wants a Woman score?” she writes analysis channel.
Shocking
Well, extremely thin. “I find that shocking and very unexpected, but Boerzoekt Vrouw scores much lower than before. Yesterday 1,369,000 viewers watched. Previously there were always more than 2 million, often almost 3 million. And also for the first time: Yvon Jaspers has been overtaken by Linda de Mol.”
Linda was simultaneously busy with her golden suitcases. “Linda had 1,389,000 viewers with Miljoenenjacht. The News also has more viewers: 1,525,000. I’m actually perplexed. Ok, there wasn’t very much buzz and the international version always scores a little less than the ‘normal’ version, but still.”
Rating boxes
Tina can’t believe that Farmer Wants a Woman has suddenly become an average-scoring program. “What is the influence of the new audience research? NPO seems to be more affected by this than SBS 6 or RTL 4.”
For Yvon, we hope for many postponed viewers, Tina writes. “That will probably work out well, 2 million will probably be reached, but 3 million viewers seems to be out of reach for the time being.”
“Enough of it!”
TV critic Wilfred Takken van NRC thinks the viewer is tired of farming. “Viewers seem to be slowly getting tired of Farmer Seeks Woman. Only 1.4 million people watched on Sunday evening. A little more than B&B Vol Liefde, but not nearly as much as before, when the program attracted two to three million people, once even five million.”
There has been an international version of Boerzoekt Vrouw twice before, Tina explains. They kicked off with 3.4 and 3.7 million viewers. “From 2009 through now, INCLUDING delayed viewing has not scored a single regular episode under 3 million viewers.”
All in all, a historic turnaround and a potential drama for Yvon Jaspers.