"The Wedge" had mixed success with audiences and critics during its first season. The ratings for the first season were initially strong, with the first episode receiving 1.5 million viewers and later episodes averaging over one million viewers. The shows recent popularity waned nearer the end of the first season, with episodes reaching a much smaller audience (681,000 viewers for the episode that aired on 21 November 2006). Despite the show's first season initially receiving high ratings, it was criticised by some TV reviewers. Issue was taken with the perceived over-use of canned laughter and what they considered to be poorly written, dated, cheap humour that attacked easy targets and propagated offensive stereotypes. Shortly after the series debuted, Catherine Deveny, one of the writers, wrote an article for The Age in which she revealed that the producers had insisted on re-writing and blanding out the scripts in the hope of appealing to a wider audience, but maintained that the writers and performers were themselves talented comics.