By Mary Mrad For Daily Mail Australia
03:29 11 Jun 2024, updated 03:41 11 Jun 2024
The future of free-to-air television in Australia hangs in the balance.
In recent years, 34 different shows across Channels Seven, Nine and Ten have been axed or have quietly disappeared from TV schedules, Yahoo Lifestyle reports.
Ten’s The Bachelor and The Masked Singer, both hosted by Osher Günsberg, have no plans to return to screens anytime soon.
The Bachelors and its various spinoffs have not been given dates for 2024 despite being announced at the annual Upfronts.
Meanwhile, The Masked Singer is understood to be expensive to produce due to the elaborate costumes, high production quality and international talent required to put on the show.
Nine’s game shows Millionaire Hot Seat and Australian Ninja Warrior have also been scrapped due to declining viewership.
The network also released new shows, including Shaynna Blaze’s Country Home Rescue and Kate Langbroek’s My Mum, Your Dad, but they too have been axed.
Celebrity Apprentice and Beauty and the Geek are also among the shows that won’t be returning to Nine’s screening this year.
Meanwhile, Seven’s Big Brother reboot failed to attract enough viewers and has been given the chop.
The network’s military training television program SAS Australia has also not been commissioned for a fifth season and the show’s future remains uncertain.
The previous season, filmed in the rugged landscapes of Jordan, followed the show’s tradition of challenging locations, including the Snowy Mountains, Capertee Valley, and Blue Mountains in NSW.
One source told Yahoo, the breaks between jobs in television are ‘getting longer and longer’.
‘Every year the breaks between jobs are getting longer and longer to the point a lot of us (crew) are now leaving the industry,’ they said.
‘Ten years ago we’d be booked consistently with jobs locked in 12 months in advance for all of the networks, now everyone’s scrambling to try to get on a three-day pilot shoot. Everything is so uncertain.’