ITV has swung the axe on late night slot flop The Nightly Show, as well as drama Fearless and gameshow Bigheads fronted by Jason Manford.
Bosses culled the shows after all three performed poorly during their debut series – with The Night Show losing half of its three million viewers in the first week of the series.
Despite being presented by a variety of celeb hosts including David Williams, Davina McCall, Gordon Ramsay and Dermot O’Leary, the rumoured £10million chat show was mauled by critics and continued to be ignored by audiences.
Read more: David Walliams and ITV savaged for “awful” The Nightly Show
It is believed chiefs even pushed the News At Ten back half an hour in the schedules to give The Nightly Show every chance to succeed in the plum 10pm slot.
Fearless, a drama starring Harry Potter star Helen McCrory as a human rights lawyer, was also ditched.
The six-part crime thriller debuted to an audience of over seven million last June, but lost two million viewers for the second episode of the series and barely scraped much over five million viewers again.
Bigheads, which saw contestants take part in challenges dressed as celebrities with oversized heads, was also pinpointed as a failure in an ITV report reviewing the broadcaster’s performance in 2017.
Attracting around two millions viewers per episode, it went up against and BBC One’s Antiques Roadshow in the same Sunday time slot but pulled in only a third of the audience.
The report confirmed: “Some of our schedule did not perform as well as we had hoped, for example The Nightly Show, Fearless and Bigheads, so will not return in 2018.”
News of the shows being binned was met with a mixed response from those viewers who could remember them.
A quick reminder why The Nightly Show failed. There’s still room for a nightly talk show in the UK, but you need a regular host and a writers’ room culture. Better monologues and regular features means less reliance on star guests (a big problem here). https://t.co/rML1kSYRiL
— Chuck Thomas (@chuckthomasuk) March 1, 2018
One viewer was especially displeased, wondering whether Bigheads hadn’t been edgy or trendy enough for commissioners.
@ITV once again being a load of idiots and axing one hell of a funny and entertaining sunday night gameshow @ItvBigheads (We’ll miss you bigheads), probably not enough sex and violence for them in it
— Alison (@alicat85uk) March 1, 2018
But another speculated there may be more to come in the programme cull.
So @ITV axes The Nightly Show and Bigheads after one series each as it has a cull of poorly performing shows! More to follow, what next?
— James Leslie (@etonjamesleslie) March 1, 2018
Read more: Line Of Duty copper leaves fans gobsmacked on The Nightly Show
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