We’re Not Saying Daniel MacPherson Killed ‘Dancing With The Stars’…

…But if Channel Seven were hoping that installing MacPherson in the recently departed Daryl Somers’ vacated role and moving the show to Sunday night (to compete with Idol’s biggest night of the week, natch), it looks as though their logic may have been a little fuzzy. After blitzing viewers with portentous After The Olympics™ promos throughout the Beijing Games, Seven probably thought everyone would tune, en masse, to Dancing come Sunday night like a bunch of bogo-pogo-obsessed Stepford residents. The result was not quite what they’d hoped for:

[T]he one-time mega hit fell back into average-ville with Sunday night’s loudest ratings thud.

But as far as Nine and Ten were concerned, it was “thanks and cheers” after DWTS lost half a million of its 2007 first-episode viewers, and 900,000 from the year before.

It was a still an OK average of 1.33 million Sunday night viewers but the show has never been average before, reports media writer Marcus Casey.

I long ago lost my taste for Dancing - why watch that when you can watch a show, as So You Think You Can Dance maestro Nigel Lythgoe sagely said, where the real stars are - but this was certainly the strongest bunch of “stars” they’ve had for a while. If not even the prospect of Red Symons quick-stepping up a storm is enough to get the ratings bubbling, perhaps Seven best think about what OS franchise to buy in next.