Episode one in Mount Eliza is barely a day old and The Block has already found two things to argue about: whether Darren Palmer’s “quiet luxury” pep talk was inspiring or just Kim Kardashian by way of Bunnings, and whether the show’s animators know what a horse actually looks like. Business as usual, really.
Welcome to the new season of The Slop.
u/TodayCandid9686, r/TheBlock
What Blockheads Are Saying
The r/TheBlock crowd spent premiere night doing what it does best: watching the show closer than the people who made it. The loudest thread wasn’t about the houses at all, it was about a CGI horse. Multiple posts, including this one and this one, piled onto the same complaint: generative AI turned up in the opening minutes, from a horse rearing through the build site to a full-blown alien cutaway, and fans were not having it. One commenter called it “insulting to TV and the arts,” another reckoned the show could at least admit it out loud, and a third, in the thread simply titled “AI Slop”, put it best: “Welcome to the new season of The Slop.”
Not every thread was about AI. One popular post mourned the loss of actual renovating as the show’s focus, arguing the format is getting buried under filler and product placement. Head over to the sub if you want the full pile-on, premiere night on r/TheBlock never disappoints.
What the Mastheads Ran Today
The trade press spent today crunching the premiere numbers, and depending which masthead you trust, either Nine or Seven gets to claim launch night. TV Blackbox’s overnight metro numbers have The Block’s 1.11 million average narrowly ahead of The Voice’s 1.10 million, while B&T (also covered by TV Tonight) called it for Seven on national reach, 2.44 million to The Block’s 2.2 million, with Seven winning the night outright on share thanks to the Commonwealth Games. Take your pick of scoreboard.
Meanwhile TV Blackbox’s own episode recap zeroed in on the actual show: Darren Palmer’s quiet luxury brief left one team scrambling to lighten a guest bedroom they’d already committed to in navy, the new share-house format has split opinion, and building hours are now capped at 7am to 6pm on weekdays with nothing on Sundays, a rule Scott Cam delivered with all the warmth of “treat every hour like it’s your last.” Two teams also spent day one building in the wrong room, which feels like a metaphor for something.
That’s the state of play after night one. Same time tomorrow, presumably with more AI horses.
