(Welcome to my weekly streaming ratings report, the single best guide to what’s popular in streaming TV and what isn’t. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. If you were forwarded this email, please subscribe to get these insights each week.)
The lineup in this week’s Streamings Ratings Report is freaking huge. Seriously, I should have teased it with a fun made-up contest like I did two years ago with “Hot August Genre Wars”. This week is “Semi-Hot June Genre Wars” featuring…
Bridgerton versus The Boys versus House of the Dragon versus a new divisive Star Wars show!
(And, fine, Sweet Tooth.)
So that’s the plan this week, and hopefully it’s a fun distraction from everything else. I don’t cover, comment on, or even really mention politics much in this newsletter because that’s just not my job. Frankly, a lot of other people handle that beat way better, including almost every other entertainment industry pundit and columnist. Plus it’s nice to have a corner of your media diet that doesn’t cover the same stuff or make the same points as everyone else. (There is one exception, which is a policy issue: antitrust. Luckily antitrust both fits into the purview of this website and almost no one in Hollywood talks about.) After a turbulent, topsy-turvy week of politics, let’s escape into streaming ratings!
This issue is going to cover the first two weeks of June. Then I’ll have another double issue next week. After that, the Streaming Ratings Report should be all back on track. And at the end of the month, it’s time to cover all the flops, bombs and misses of the year, along with the hits so far. But this week, we’re talking about those big new genre shows, Presumed Innocent’s debut, the US-versus-global ratings for two buzzy films, Mayor of Kingstown’s successful opening, the candidate for summer 2024’s Suits slot, and more…
(Reminder: The streaming ratings report focuses on the U.S. market and compiles data from Nielsen’s weekly top ten viewership ranks, Luminate’s Top Ten Data, Showlabs, TV Time trend data, Samba TV household viewership, company datecdotes, and Netflix hours viewed data, Google Trends, and IMDb to determine the most popular content. While most data points are current, Nielsen’s data covers the weeks of June 3rd to June 16th.)
Television – Streaming’s Second Big Genre Showdown
The big genre showdown came in two waves this year. First, we started small for the week of 3-Jun:
- Disney+’s The Acolyte (the first season of a new show set in the Star Wars universe, which reportedly cost $180 million)
- Netflix’s Sweet Tooth (the third and final season of a Vertigo comic adapted into a TV series)
Those were the appetizers, but the main course was three huge shows coming back to streaming:
- Netflix’s Bridgerton (the second part of the third season of one of their biggest series)
- Max’s House of the Dragon (the second season of the spinoff of the biggest pay cable/streaming series of the 2010s)
- Prime Video’s The Boys (season four of the superhero series)
When it comes to big genre shows like these, I’m willing to just bluntly ask, “Who won?” So let’s rank ’em.
1. Bridgerton
Wow. Bridgerton managed to do even better than its big premiere just four weeks ago, with 56.7 million hours.
That’s also obviously good enough to get on the 40 million hour chart. Remember, these are the shows and (rarely) films that get more than 40 million hours in one week. This single week is the 16th best week since the start of 2021. Interestingly, Nielsen told us that a big percentage (roughly 72%) of this viewership was the four new episodes, not older seasons.
Bridgerton did well on the other metrics too. It smashed it on Luminate, with 51.7 million hours in its first week, and Samba TV had it at 1.9 million households in the first four days. (And Samba TV, one of the biggest pro-binge outfits out there, actually said the strong hold, compared to the first batch of episodes, justifies splitting up seasons into two parts.)
2. House of the Dragon
HotD’s performance is a good example of why you shouldn’t read too much into early viewership numbers. For instance, I saw headlines from both HBO and Samba TV that the current season saw a big drop from the debut of season one. So I expected some disappointment. HBO itself estimated that 7.8 million people watched live, down from 10 million the year before. Samba TV had it at 1.3 million households, down 50% from the 2.6 million the year before.
But then, looking slightly ahead, it seems like HotD may be one of the biggest shows of the year. (Like all weekly shows, it depends on how well it holds its audience.) It will actually make the top of the Samba TV charts and (glancing ahead one week because we have the data) House of the Dragon will break 20 million hours viewed on streaming according to Nielsen. This week, it had over 12 million hours on the acquired charts, but most of that was viewers (like me) rewatching last season to remember what happened!
To be clear, those initial numbers showing a big drop from season one’s opening aren’t wrong, but that probably says more about the pent-up demand for more Game of Thrones that accompanied the launch two years ago than anything else. Remember, GoT was (depending on how you count) the biggest non-broadcast show of the 2010s. HotD is still doing well, likely stabilizing at this lower, but still very high, level. As such, HBO also gave us the datecdote that they had the most viewership on Max of all time when the latest season came out. Again, this show saw a decline, but it’s still HBO/Warner Bros. Discovery’s biggest show.
Listen, it’s close between this and The Boys, but I think HotD takes it by a hair.
3. The Boys
The Boys may be third on this list, but it’s still a massive hit. It opened with 19.9 million hours in its first week (with three episodes to start, then new episodes come out weekly) and will get over 20 million hours the week of 17-June. (Again, Nielsen has already sent out the data.) Like HotD, it has a huge number of IMDb reviews.
So far, I’d call all of these shows very strong debuts. But not so much for the following shows…
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