(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.)
Since this report comes out well after these shows come out—due to Nielsen’s four-week ratings delay—I’m definitely not the first person to point out that Netflix released not one but two spy shows back-to-back: The Night Agent and The Recruit in their respective second seasons. Both shows had done well for Netflix back in the day (2023 and 2022 respectively) so releasing them nearly simultaneously was…certainly a choice.
And part of a trend: spies, spies and more spies. Spies everywhere!
So let’s look at the two big shows of the week of 20-Jan and 27-January in Part I of this week’s Streaming Ratings Report double issue, along with a look at every spy show that’s ever come out and a whole bunch of movies about spies, hitmen and assassins. (The next issue will cover everything else that came out…)
(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 January 20th to February 2nd.)
Television – The Spy Shows That Came in from the Cold, er, Multi-Year Hiatuses
The Night Agent’s first season did really well, and guess what? So did season two. The second season is massive with 51.8 million and 48.7 million hours in its first two weeks according to Nielsen, good enough to make the 40 million hour club twice:
The Recruit never did as well as The Night Agent—its debut season had less than half as many hours viewed—but this new season seems even smaller, as The Recruit only had 19.9 million hours in its debut. It had fewer episodes (only 6) but that’s still not a great number. Here’s a comparison:
Both shows made Samba TV, but Samba TV noted that The Recruit slumped nearly 50% in unique households between season one and two:
The Luminate data tells a similar story. The Night Agent peaked at 60 million hours, falling to 30 million, whereas The Recruit peaked at 16.2 million. The IMDb scores reflect this too, as The Night Agent has a 7.5 on 137K reviews and The Recruit has a 7.4 on only 57K.
Despite the number of episodes, in this case, I think The Night Agent is a big hit, and The Recruit is just fine. If anything, the similarity between the two shows probably hurt The Recruit, even if it had less interest going in.
Spy-fall
So why release two spy shows back-to-back? Maybe Netflix figured that they put out so many spy shows (or espionage-adjacent shows) with their fellow streamers, that launching them back-to-back didn’t matter.
Seriously, I went through my database and here are the “spy shows” I found:
Andor (2022), Black Doves (2024), Citadel (2023), Hanna (2019), In From the Cold (2022), Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan (2018), Liaison (2023) Lioness (2023), Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2024), Rabbit Hole (2023), Slow Horses (2022), The Agency (2024), The Day of the Jackal (2024), The Old Man (2022) The Night Agent (2023), The Recruit (2022), The Terminal List (2022), The Veil (2024), Treason (2022), Who is Erin Carter? (2023)
(Side note: Making this list last week, I actually forgot about Citadel, arguably the most expensive show on this list!) Here’s a timeline:
That’s a lot of shows!
Of those, the big winner is The Night Agent, with Jack Ryan right behind it.
(To be clear, a show with no viewership missed the top ten, but presumably still had some viewership, it’s just not publicly known.)
But it’s not just TV shows. Seriously, so many action films involve a spy, assassin, hitman or mercenary. Just last week, Netflix released Back in Action, another riff on the “secret agent/killer (mostly ex-CIA agent) comes out of retirement to fight an evil employer” formula, so I made my researcher go through our database and find every film where that description applied:
Back in Action (2025), The Family Plan (2023), Lou (2022), The Mother (2023).
This list doesn’t include TV shows like Hanna, In From the Cold, The Old Man, The Terminal List, and Who is Erin Carter? One movie started this recent trend, John Wick, but there’s a ton of examples of theatrical films like Love Hurts or Nobody.
I also grabbed examples of the “Noob/regular person winds up in an action film”, again, they’re mostly spies/secret agents:
Ghosted (2023), Role Play (2024), The Man from Toronto (2022), The Union (2024)
Here are protagonists (mostly assassins/hitmen) battling their former employers:
Ava (2020), Gunpowder Milkshake (2021), Kate (2021), The Gray Man (2022), The Killer (2023)
The winner of these?
Here are my takeaways:
- I don’t think we’ve reached “peak” spy show; they’ve been a consistent feature of the streaming era, at least since when I started tracking the data in the “Streaming Ratings era”, and show no sign of slowing down. Why? Well…
- Spy shows’ hit rate is really good. Only a handful of shows and films missed the ratings charts, and some had a lot of success. That’s a good hit rate.
So, here’s the thing: spy shows and films work. They put up good viewership numbers, clearly. If I had one criticism, it’s just that the genre is, at this point a little cliched, as you can see with all the action movies. (But it gets a fraction of the criticism of comic book movies or TV shows.)
