by Thinus Ferreira
SABC3's troubled local primetime telenovela The Estate, is going on a break next week, with the show, produced by Clive Morris Productions that is going off-air for two and a half months.
The Estate, revolving around the dual rich/poor communities of an exclusive housing development has been plagued by production changes and challenges since its debut in April 2021 on the public broadcaster's S3 channel where it launched as an Isidingo replacement with little marketing, publicity or fanfare.
The Estate has been struggling severely to hook eyeballs, and with anaemic ratings constantly slipping lower, the SABC decided to rebroadcast the first season during prime time on sister channel SABC1 to try and lure more viewers to the second season on S3.
The Estate had at most a measly 296 682 viewers at 19:00 during primetime in February, again down from January's paltry 312 382 that made a production break or cancellation almost a certainty.
The Estate made its debut on SABC3 with disappointing ratings that kept worsening, mostly due to damage suffered by the success of e.tv's House of Zwide in the same death-zone 19:00-timeslot.
Last year the cast and crew of The Estate went unpaid for months with several broken promises of payment and with the SABC that said it had "great concern" about the issue.
Clive Morris Productions told cast and crew in late-2021 that their payments can't be made because of "delayed payment from the SABC", but the SABC said that it had paid the company.
On Monday SABC3 confirmed that "the popular telenovela The Estate will take a break from broadcast with the last episode of season 2 broadcasting on Friday 15 April". A third season of The Estate will start on 1 July.
Pat van Heerden, S3 channel boss, told TVwithThinus that "The Estate is a key pillar of the channel. We are intending recommissioning and it's in the process of recommissioning. We are however facing a little bit of a gap between season 2 and season 3 which is very unfortunate".
"We're absolutely committed to the production quality and how The Estate has been working for S3. It both works in the morning - bringing audiences in. We have an omnibus on a Saturday; it does exceptionally well for us, and obviously our most challenging time is primetime."
"Isidingo was off for so long, so we've lost a lot of audiences who were loyal at that time on local soaps. We're building; since the beginning of The Estate we now see an incremental graph going up, slowly, but it's building and we have a commitment to that. And not only to The Estate but also to more long-running drama that we're trying to build on the channel."
"And we have to. We're dead in the water if we think we're going to a foreign local TV channel - it's not a possibility. We have to be a local channel providing high-end local drama."
The Estate's timeslot will be replaced by a rebroadcast of the SABC1 series Family Secrets with Khanyi Mbau, Katlego Danke, Vusi Kunene and Robert Whitehead.
