Reception
In Blue Heelers' twelfth season, ratings were at an all time low of 1.2 million viewers per episode, which was less than half what the show had been attracting during its peak from 1997 to 2000, when it was drawing more than 2.5 million viewers. After these falling ratings during 2005, Seven decided to take action and considered cancelling the series altogether. However, before doing this, they commissioned a shortened season consisting of only 11 episodes, taking the show's episode tally to 510. This season was shortened from the normal season length of around 40 episodes.
On 13 January 2006, the network ended months of speculation when they officially cancelled the series. The news was broken by television critic Robert Fidgeon on radio station 3AW, and was shortly followed by the official announcement which appeared on the front-page of nearly all of Australia's major newspapers including The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney's Daily Telegraph, The Melbourne Herald Sun, The Melbourne Age and Brisbane's Courier Mail.
For this thirteenth season, Seven chose to move Blue Heelers from its Wednesday-night, primetime timeslot, which it had occupied for 10 years, to the lower-rated Saturday-night timeslot, which also saw it up against popular British police programme The Bill; this move was slammed by cast member John Wood. Ratings for this season were generally low; no episode ranked in OzTAM's top 20 programme list for the week.
The final episode, "One Day More", achieved 1,512,000 viewers in the five major Australian cities: Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane. Whilst enough to justify a Sunday primetime slot, it was still a very low rating figure and was not enough for Seven to justify the continued production of the programme, which was estimated at costing them almost $500 000 per episode to produce. Additionally, more "reality-type" programmes such as Border Security which cost $100 000 to produce and package were achieving record amounts of viewers as high as 2 million per episode; Blue Heelers had not had 2 million viewers for over 5 years.
Read more about this topic: Blue Heelers (season 13)
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