The last week of May was a very interesting one in Aussie TV. TV network giants Seven & Nine, who are always dominant of the industry, were given a little bit of a wake up call by the other, much smaller networks, Ten, SBS & ABC. It's also become very apparent this year that local Aussie shows are winning the ratings over the US mega-hits for the first time ever.

Seven won the week in ratings again with a 27.5% share. Followed by Nine (25.7%), Ten (24.2%), ABC (17.5%) & SBS (5.2%).

Top Shows This Week:
1. Seven News Sunday - Seven
2. Masterchef Challenge - Ten
3. Nine News - Nine
4. Talkin' 'Bout Your Generation - Ten
5. Seven News - Seven
6. Spicks & Specks - ABC
7. NCIS - Ten
8. The Chasers War on Everything - ABC
9. Thank God You're Here - Seven
10. Merlin - Ten

If you compare this week with week 22 in the TV calendar 3 years ago in 2006, 6 out of the top 10 shows of the week were international, including Lost, Desperate Housewives, Greys Anatomy, CSI & House. In 2009, its rare to have more than 1 international show making the list! Anyone have an idea as to why the change over the years?

- Former AFL Footy Show host Eddie McGuire has been asked by the nine network to return, claming it would boost ever-falling ratings.

- 24 star Kiefer Sutherland insists that he does not think that he is 'the real Jack Bauer' after a head-butting incident on the Jimmy Fallon Show.

- The Steven Spielberg / Tom Hanks upcoming mini-seires The Pacific is due to air in 2010 & big international markets in countries like the UK, Germany, Canada & France have already bought the rights to air i. The Pacific is a follow up of the sucessfull mini-series Band of Brothers and will follow the stories of the allies battle's in the Pacific theatre of WWII.

- The Australian Communications & Media Authority announced that Channel Nine has topped the commerical free-to-air broadcasters in delivering locally-produced adverts in 2008. Aussie networks are required to screen locally-made ads for at least 80% of their ads that show between 6am & midnight.

- CANCELLED: My Name is Earl.

- ABC has bought an assortment of content from BBC including the third series of Robin Hood as well as Life, Yellowstone, Nature's Great Events, Human Journey, Later...with Jools Holland & Being Erica.

Starting from today, every Sunday I'm going to post "The Week that Was in Ausssie TV" which is a short recap of Australian TV ratings, news and programming for the previous week as well as news from our favourite US shows. Enjoy and tell me what you think!

Well what a surprise, Channel Seven takes the week with a 27.9% share, winning three days. Considering, they've only been beaten by Nine 4 or 5 times this year out of 21 weeks, not too bad. I bet they're popping the champagne at 7 HQ. Nine is in second play with 26% followed by Ten's 23.4%, ABC's 16.9% and SBS coming in last with 5.9%.

Top Shows This Week:
1. Seven News (Sunday) - 1.7m - Seven
2. Thank God You're Here - 1.68 - Ten
3. Seven News (Weeknights) - 1.66 - Seven
4. NCIS - 1.62 - Ten
5. Talkin' 'Bout Your Generation - 1.6 - Ten
6. Nine News (Sunday) - 1.55 - Nine
7. Today Tonight - 1.53 - Seven

- There is still hope for the Gossip Girl spinoff which the CW was going to air starring Brittany Snow. The network developed six different pilots and with a little bit of hope, one of them will be picked up.

- Former Home and Away actor Nicholas Bishop has been cast into Fox's new series Past Life and will be apart of a team of investigators who solve mysteries in their clients previous lives.

- A new dating show called Loveland has been picked up by Nine which involves contestants going on dates as their computer generated animated character whilst the audience watches.

- A Melbourne woman who was trialed in court last year for apparently stalking the 2004 American Idol singer Diana DeGarmo has pleaded guilty to 4 new counts of virtual stalking.

- The Biggest Loser Australia has kicked out their long-time host Ajay Rochester who has plans to start a career in America. It's about bloody time! Rumour has it that Jackio O will take over.

- Norway wins Eurovision 2009 with their song 'Fairytale' by Alexander Ryback.

- Bud Tingwell died this week at 87year of age. The Aussie TV hero has made over 140 film/TV appearances. RIP Bud!

- CANCELLED SHOWS: Without a Trace, Eleventh Hour, Privileged, The Unit, Samantha Who?, According to Jim, Terminator, Unusuals,

- So You Think You Can Dance (US) is returning to Ten in June.

- Ten moves Harpers Island to the ridiculous time of 1.25 AM on Sunday night. Or is t hat Monday morning?

Thanks for all the kind comments in my last blog

You've probably noticed the new banner & personal picture. I'vekept with the same theme for the baner for a while now, I just changed the pictures & made it bigger.

I need your advice, do you prefer this one (above), the old one, or the REALLY old one?

I've also managed to gain the editorships for the aussie shows Masterchef (Australia) and Swift and Shift Couriers which aired on SBS. If you're Australian yourself, check out Swift and Shift on youtube, it's absoloute gold.

Anyways I've had some thoughts on the format-change that Tv.com has been doing. It was released in an article that the site is trying to compete with Hulu.com, which is fair enough. So what they did is they updated the layout of the site to make it content based (Videos, images etc) rather than a TV fan community based website where its focused on blogs, forums and user contributions. The one thing they didn't think about was the fact that Tv.com is completely reliant on users to submit information to shows. So the second they put the content in front of it's loyal users, many tv.com members left and now Tv.com is like this at the moment.

That's just my opinion anyway, what do you think?

Have a good weekend everyone!

Anyone remember me?

I used to be Tv.com-craaazy and then I left but after all of these years I have still managed to check back on the site at least once a week and the last couple of months I've been on every day and before I knew it I decided to become an editor for a show again and now I've started to write blogs again!

It's too bad that I deleted all my old blogs when I left, I still can't remember why I ever did that.

So the new design isn't all too bad after getting used to it but the one thing I've noticed is that there use to be this big Tv.com community where everyone knew everyone and when you went to a a certain show's forum you knew alot of the people posting on the boards as regulars for that forum and you could always expect similar people commenting on your blog but things have changed, for the worst.With the redesign, it's so hard to keep to that old community. Before the main page felt like the community's home with so much going on linking everyone together and there was an easy blog tracker on your profile page. I can't describe it, it's so different now.

Another thing I've noticed is that there is no one on this new Australia sub-site. There used to be dozens of Tv.com members fighting over editorships for new Australian shows and the forums where flooded, what ever happened?