M-Net has grabbed another great new drama show, Elementary with Jonny Lee Miller as Sherlock Holmes as Lucy Liu as sidekick dr Watson. Elementary will start on M-Net on Wednesday 16 January at 20:30 and follows closely on the heels of the American broadcasting date where a handful of episodes have already aired.
Elementary moves the sleuthing action from Victorian London to modern-day New York and the show is great as Jonny Lee Miller's classic literary detectives helps to solve cases with his sidekick who often has to suffer his foibles and flaws, in tow.
Elementary marks M-Net's next big get in the South African pay TV broadcaster's fight to reclaim its throne as the must-watch premiere TV channel in the country for general entertainment. Viewers tune in for shows, not channels, and in 2012 - from megabuzz shows ranging from Downton Abbey to The Walking Dead and others, viewers didn't tune to M-Net to see them.
Of the plethora of terrific Titanic programming to mark the centenary (of which M-Net had neither documentaries nor any of the dramas) not even the Titanic movie was on M-Net which was scooped by e.tv.
Already M-Net's brave new programming strategy to get American TV shows quicker and to broadcast episodes faster in South Africa have yielded spectacular results. Not in aeons has a show on a Friday night in South Africa made a blip on the viewership radar, but the awesome Arrow which M-Net acquired is doing just that: it immediately started to make the top 10 of most-watched shows on M-Net per week.
The new Chicago Fire is another good acquisition for M-Net which also started in South Africa quickly on the heels of America. That show too now makes the top 10 list of shows on M-Net viewership wise.
With programming like Elementary, Chicago Fire, Suits, Arrow, Revenge - the second season of which will start soon in 2013 and which is also a weekly M-Net Top 10 viewership hit - followed by several other new exciting shows such as The Hour, The Newsroom, and in 2013 Political Animals, The Americans and The Following as well as the end of ageing hits which ended this year such as Desperate Housewives, M-Net is rejuvenating and diversifying and moving away from the rather bland procedural dramas which blanketed the M-Net schedule and drained its buzz factor in 2012.
Finally it seems, no more lazy Law & Order Los Angeles and ooh-its-filmed-outside soap as M-Net canned the moribund The Wild. The channel is definitely making big incrementals steps to juice up its value proposition to subscribers and viewers and to stand out again after other channels and competitors started to steal its thunder.
