The whingers have won.

Police Ten 7 is over. 

TVNZ has just announced today that they’re canning the show after 20 years. 

They reckon that not enough people are watching anymore. It doesn’t “sustain the viewership needed across both broadcast and digital as more of our audience migrates online.” 

So you tell me how Police Ten 7 has gone from being described as a ‘ratings success’ in 2021, to a show that can’t pull enough of an audience in 2023. 

If you take TVNZ at their word then it’s very tempting to come to the conclusion that this has happened because TVNZ started mucking around with the formula. 

They bowed to pressure from critics who called the show racist and called for it to be cancelled, and they started taking the punch out of it.

Gone was the goodies and baddies language that graham bell used to use 

It was no longer okay to call the bad guys ‘vicious morons,’ ‘gutless goons,’ and ‘lunatic scumbag[s].’ 

They were now ‘offenders.’ 

The show wasn’t Police Ten 7 anymore; it was renamed Ten 7 Aotearoa. 

And so in the end, if you watch some of the more recent clips available online, it became boring.  

It’s actually a pity.

Because this wasn’t just entertainment, this show solved crime.

It led to 963 arrests, including solving serious assaults and homicides, 

It is ironic that at the very time that crime is on the rise and we could do with all the help possible to help solve it, at the very time that public media is apparently in such a bad way that taxpayers are going to have to pump millions into more into propping up local content…

TVNZ cancels a crime solving show that used to presumably make it money.