The Neighbourhood, Graham Norton’s flagship new reality show, has been pulled from its primetime slot on ITV just weeks after it first aired.
Marking the talk show host’s first foray into reality TV, The Neighbourhood centres on a fictional street, where different real-life households must compete to be named the most popular and win £250,000 to share.
While the widely publicised show has so far been broadcast in a prime 9pm viewing slot, it has now been relegated to a later start time of 10.45pm. This comes as The Sun reports that viewership of the series had dwindled to just 500,000 viewers by the third episode.
An ITV spokesperson told The Independent: “The full box set of The Neighbourhood is now available to stream on ITVX. Additionally, the show will continue to air in an evening slot on ITV.”
With Norton at the helm and a hefty cash prize up for grabs, the original format show was clearly a big launch for ITV. The series opener was broadcast on Friday 24 April in an enviable time slot, airing between the explosive two-part I’m A Celebrity… South Africa final.
For the remainder of the series, two episodes had been scheduled for broadcast on ITV each week, initially in a 9pm time slot on Thursdays and Fridays. From Thursday (7 May), however, The Neighbourhood will instead be shown nearly two hours later. This week, the original time slot will instead air a 2024 episode of Long Lost Family on Thursday and a celebrity special of Beat The Chasers from 2021 on Friday.
While full viewing figures for the third and fourth episode of The Neighbourhood are still being determined, the low numbers for the series likely stem, in part, from the fact that all 11 episodes of the show have been uploaded to ITVX as a box set.
In a three-star review, The Independent’s Katie Rosseinsky compared the series – somewhat unfavourably – to The Traitors. “There are some enjoyably big characters here… and the smaller interactions are sweet, too, like when one of the teenage contestants blushingly declares to the camera that one of the boys next door is ‘so fit it’s unreal’, before we cut to them having a stilted conversation in the local coffee shop,” she wrote.
“But for the most part, there is none of the psychological intrigue of, say, a Traitors round table, although presumably things will become more tense the longer the residents have been stuck in the Neighbourhood – and the closer they get to the prize money. For now, though, there’s not quite enough to ensure that viewers will want to stick around for the full duration of the tenancy.”
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