Time Series 3 David Tennant: An 8.04m Opener Halved Last Time, and ITV’s The Party Is Waiting at 9pm on Sunday

The first series of Time opened with 8.04 million viewers. The second opened with 4.14 million. Now Time series 3 David Tennant is the BBC’s plan to stop the slide, and ITV has put a brand-new drama called The Party in the same Sunday 9pm slot to make sure it doesn’t get a free run.

Both start this Sunday, 11 October.

I haven’t seen a frame of either, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. What I can do is look at what the last month of Sunday nights has already told us, because ITV and the BBC have just run this exact experiment with The Blame and The Split Up, and the result wasn’t close. That’s the useful bit. It says more about how British drama gets watched in 2026 than any preview clip will.

Time series 3 David Tennant: the cast problem

Time was never really about a format. It was about two men. Sean Bean and Stephen Graham, one a prison officer who’d stopped sleeping, the other an inmate running out of ways to survive, made series one the kind of drama people mentioned at work on Monday morning. It won the Best Mini-Series BAFTA in 2022, and Bean took Best Actor. Lucy Mangan called their performances “astonishing” in the Guardian.

Series two swapped them for Jodie Whittaker and Bella Ramsey, moved to a women’s prison, and kept Jimmy McGovern’s central idea intact: show what the system does to people, and let the audience feel it. Critics were kind. The audience, though, had already started leaving.

Series three is an anthology again, which is the BBC’s way of saying that nobody should expect a character to carry over. This time it’s a young offenders institution, filmed in Belfast, with David Tennant as veteran prison officer Bailey and Siobhan Finneran back as the chaplain, Marie-Louise. She’s the one thread running through all three series. The set-up, per the synopsis, is that tragedy strikes inside, Marie-Louise clashes with Bailey, and Bailey knows more than he’s saying.

It’s a smart piece of casting, and I’d say a slightly nervous one. Tennant is as close as British television gets to a safe pair of hands on a Sunday night. People will turn up for him. But the first two series didn’t need a name above the title, because the premise itself, a man we recognise breaking down under institutional pressure, did the selling. Putting Tennant in the lead says the BBC thinks the premise needs help.

What two series of Time actually delivered

Here are the figures as recorded on the series page on Wikipedia, which draws on BARB data.

Series	Episode 1	Episode 2	Episode 3	Average
Series 1 (2021)	8.04m	5.18m	5.06m	6.09m
Series 2 (2023)	4.14m	3.71m	3.78m	3.89m

Read across the rows and two things jump out. The first is the obvious one: series two’s opener was almost exactly half of series one’s. The second is less obvious and, I think, more important. Series two barely lost anything between episodes one and three. It dropped about 9 per cent. Series one dropped by more than a third in a single week.

That tells you series two wasn’t a bad drama that people abandoned. It was a drama that a smaller, loyal audience stuck with. The big first-night number in 2021 was curiosity and a huge Sean Bean-shaped marketing push, and it evaporated. The 3.89 million average is the real Time audience. That’s the benchmark series three has to beat, and I’d argue anything above 4.14 million for episode one counts as a win.

For context, the same week in September that saw The Blame start, TV Zone’s ratings report for 14 to 20 September had Strictly Come Dancing‘s first show on 6.43 million, Ludwig on 5.82 million for its penultimate episode and The Blame on 5.23 million. A modest 3.89 million would sit comfortably outside that top four. It’s a decent audience. It’s not a hit by this autumn’s standards.

A young offenders institution is a bigger gamble than it sounds

Series one was a men’s prison. Series two was a women’s prison. Both are settings viewers have met in plenty of other dramas, and both gave McGovern a recognisable world to puncture. A young offenders institution is different. The series, as the BBC describes it, looks at what jailing teenagers does to them and to the staff looking after them, and two of its central characters are teenagers, Peter and James, who form an unlikely friendship once they’re inside. Ollie McNulty and Louis McCartney play them, with Vinette Robinson, Jo Joyner, Daniel Ryan and Warren Brown among the adults.

That’s a harder pitch. A grown man losing everything is something an audience can sit with on a Sunday night. Children in custody asks them to feel something more uncomfortable, and McGovern isn’t a writer who lets people off the hook. I think it could be the best of the three series. I also think it could be the lowest-rated.

And there’s a second pressure. The anthology format only works if each series feels like an event. Series one had an Oscar-calibre pairing. Series two had Whittaker and Ramsey, both at the top of their game. Tennant is a big name, certainly, but he’s a familiar one, and his best-known roles are very far from a prison corridor. That’s either the point or the problem.

ITV has already won this fight once

Go back three weeks. On Sunday 20 September, ITV launched The Blame, six episodes of Michelle Keegan as DI Emma Crane investigating the death of a teenage figure skater. The BBC launched The Split Up in the same hour. Overnight, linear-only figures had ITV1 on 2.2 million and BBC One on 1.8 million. Close enough to call a contest.

The 7-day consolidated figures, once catch-up was counted, were not close at all. The Blame went to 5.23 million. The Split Up managed 2.96 million.

That’s a gap of more than two million viewers, and most of it opened up after the broadcast, not during it. The overnight lead was 0.4 million. The 7-day lead was 2.27 million. Both dramas had their full runs on a streaming service from the start, ITVX and iPlayer, so the release model doesn’t explain it. The figures don’t say what does. My own reading is that ITV’s audience was simply more willing to go back and watch again, and that tells you something about who sits in front of ITV drama on a Sunday.

The same week had another small example. Trigger Point finished on 5.02 million, and Vigil, up against it on BBC One, finished on 3.53 million. The BBC’s Sunday night isn’t short of good television. It’s short of audience at 9pm.

The Blame was the hit that critics weren’t sure about

Here’s my contrarian position, and I’ll stand by it: big numbers and good reviews aren’t the same thing, and The Blame proves it.

The marketing line was that it was the best drama since Happy Valley. Viewers on social media ran with it. The critics who reviewed it were considerably more mixed. Philip Cunnington’s review, carried by the Lancaster Guardian, called it a “plodding cop drama with an important message” and its murder mystery “banal”, though he thought Keegan was great. Billy Foley, writing in the Irish News, felt it was “so determined to highlight the problem of misogyny in the police that the narrative gets stretched and lost.”

And yet 5.23 million people watched the first episode within a week.

Either the critics are wrong, or the audience doesn’t care about the things critics care about, or, and this is what I’d bet on, the audience chose it because it was familiar, in the right slot and had the right face on the poster. Michelle Keegan is a reliable draw. The format was a murder mystery, which has been Britain’s default Sunday night since before most of us were born. None of that is an insult. It’s just not the same thing as being good.

It does matter for Time, though. Jimmy McGovern’s drama has never been a comfortable watch, and series three is set among teenagers. If the audience is voting for the familiar, Time is the harder sell.

The Party: ITV’s five-part answer

ITV’s choice of opponent is interesting. The Party isn’t a crime procedural. It’s adapted from Elizabeth Day’s 2017 novel, created for television by Sarah Solemani and made by World Productions, the company behind Line of Duty. Luke Evans plays Martin and Tom Cullen plays Ben, two friends who met at an elite boarding school. Thirty years on, at Ben’s birthday, news breaks of the Conservative leader’s resignation, and Ben starts thinking about standing. Old secrets come with the ambition.

The supporting cast is the real draw: Lindsay Duncan, Douglas Hodge, Joanna Scanlan, Lydia Leonard, Rakie Ayola. It’s five episodes, shown on ITV1 and STV with a boxset on ITVX and STV Player.

Here’s how I read ITV’s thinking. It’s not trying to beat Time on the night, because the night barely decides anything any more. It wants the 7-day number, the one that gets quoted a week later, and the last month says ITV is better at winning it. The BBC has the stronger brand and the more admired writer. ITV has had the bigger audience.

That sounds cynical. But it’s what the figures show.

Why the 9pm slot matters less than the schedulers think

There’s an old-fashioned idea that two big dramas at the same time on Sunday are in direct competition, and one of them has to lose. It isn’t really true any more. Plenty of households, mine included, will watch the one they fancy live and put the other on later in the week. Everyone’s watching both. They’re just doing it in a different order.

The BBC may well have spotted this. Time goes out again on Monday 12 October at 9pm, with the third episode listed for Sunday 18 October. Putting the first two episodes on consecutive nights reads like a way of dodging the clash, and it gives the BBC a second go at anyone who picked The Party on Sunday. It’s a smart bit of scheduling. It also tells you how much faith the BBC has in the Sunday slot by itself, which isn’t a lot.

The tricky bit is what happens to Strictly. We’ve already looked at how the new hosts fared, and the first show’s 6.43 million is a reminder that the BBC can still pull a crowd when it has the right show. Sunday’s the problem. ITV’s 70 Up pulled 3.53 million in the same week, which says that an audience will turn up for a programme with a clear identity, whichever channel it’s on.

My call, with the caveat that I’m guessing

I’m guessing here, because neither show has aired and there’s no review of series three yet. But there’s enough on the record to make a call.

On overnight figures, I’d expect The Party to edge it, mostly on the strength of that cast. On the 7-day figures, I’d expect Time to land somewhere between 3.5 and 4.5 million, which is a perfectly respectable result and a significant fall from where it started. Tennant should lift it a little. The subject matter will hold it back.

If The Party gets anywhere near five million, it’s another sign that ITV has found a way of turning boxset-style release into consolidated audience. If it doesn’t, the argument that the BBC’s weekly drip is the problem looks a lot weaker.

One thing I’d watch for is the gap between episode one and episode three. Time series two held its audience remarkably well. If series three does the same, that’s what the BBC wants: a small audience that stays. If it drops by a third like series one, the Tennant effect was a first-night bump and nothing more.

For anyone deciding what to watch, the honest answer is that you don’t have to choose. Time is on iPlayer, The Party is on ITVX, and we’ve got a list of the best British box sets of 2026 if neither grabs you. And if the paid streaming bills are creeping up, our piece on rotating streaming services this autumn looks at what it costs to cancel and resubscribe month by month.

Which of the two will still have your attention by the third episode?