(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.)
Before we begin today’s Streaming Ratings Report, I want to note the passing of Kevin Drum, one of the first political bloggers, one of the best data journalists out there, and one of the most influential figures in media, even if you’ve never heard of him.
He inspired this entire website/newsletter, showing how to use data and visuals to make a point and tell a story. I literally (literally!) checked his blog every week, but usually every day. I constantly link to his charts and graphs, which often cut against the mainstream media consensus, especially much of the media’s doom-mongering. Read my yearly articles on the economy for examples. Heck, I just name-checked him in my Ankler article last week. For Kevin Drum, it wasn’t “If it bleeds, it leads.” It was, “What does the data say?”
It feels like the end of the era, at least for me, since Kevin Drum’s blog was one of the last old school blogs. (It’s all newsletters now.)
Sigh.
On to this week’s report. We’ve got a lot of new TV shows to look at, and I can’t wait to dive into the data. We’ll start off with a game of “Two Not-Really-Hits and Miss” and then we’ll see if the comedy slump continues with Netflix’s latest romcom, Kinda Pregnant. All that plus Beast Games continues to roll, the limitations of IMDb reviews as a data source, whether Apple Cider Vinegar has the vinegar to do well on the charts, Netflix’s shrinking 2025 slate, an unsurprisingly huge number for the Super Bowl, 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 February 3rd to February 9th.)
Television – Three Returning Shows: Two Okay Debuts and a Miss?
Three shows returned to streaming TV during the week of 3-Feb. None were “huge”, but two were okay-to-fine.
Let’s start with the miss:
Hulu’s The Kardashians.
A few months back, discussing streaming ratings on Matt Belloni’s podcast The Town, I pointed out that companies only provide “datecdotes” when their shows do well. He mentioned that he heard Disney did NOT provide a data point for The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives because it would have made The Kardashians look bad in comparison, since they were paid so much for it. Indeed, that might be the only time a datecdote gets hidden: when it makes other shows look worse.
Listen, The Kardashians is on its sixth season, and its latest season missed the Nielsen, Samba TV and Luminate charts.
It doesn’t do well on the interest charts either. At this point, with 54 episodes to its credit, this show needs to do better to justify the paychecks. Which I’ll note: after the last extension, neither Disney nor the Kardashian clan announced the new deal terms or even leaked it. Hmmm.
Onto the “okay” releases. Netflix’s Sweet Magnolias returned for its fourth season—after a break of a year and a half—and got 17.8 million hours for its ten new episodes. That’s fine, but again below my unofficial 20-million-hours bar for “success”. It’s also down from season two’s peak (25.9 million) and season three (23.7 million). It did make Samba TV, getting to the fifth place spot, which again, isn’t great.
That’s why I call this “okay”, not “good” or “great”. That said, watching the trailer, this looks like an eminently affordable drama series nowadays, especially compared to big genre swings. I do appreciate the counter-programming of putting it up against the Super Bowl.
That leaves the third season of Invincible, the animated series based off of a successful comic book series. (I wouldn’t call that series “famous” or “popular”, because we’re talking about an industry where top sales are 10K issues a month. I definitely know what this IP is, but I also know that not everyone follows comics like I do.) This show has come out in spits and spurts over the last few years, with only four episodes coming out around this time last year.
It tends to do best on interest charts, like TV Time…
…but this season also made the Nielsen charts, with 7.0 million hours. Here’s how that stacks up:
So again, okay, not really good or great. Its fans love it, but outside of that, adult animation has a ceiling.
One final point: all three of these series reveal the challenges with using IMDb reviews. (Which, to be clear, is a data source that I love.)
If IMDb interest were perfectly correlated with viewership, then you’d expect Sweet Magnolias to lead the pack with its 7.3 on 26K reviews. But Invincible crushes it with a whopping 8.6 on over 235K reviews. That’s because genre shows (superhero, sci-fi, fantasy) tend to do much, much better than other genres. This is why, when using IMDb reviews as a proxy for interest, it’s always best to compare shows or films within their genre. (The Kardashians has a 4.5 on 5.5K reviews, for what it’s worth, which is a fine number for reality.)
Quick Notes on TV
- Netflix’s big new scripted show—and maybe put “big” in quotes—was Apple Cider Vinegar, a six-episode, binge-released, one-hour drama from Australia. It only had 6.8 million hours, which is on the very low end for Nielsen, and it missed Samba TV entirely. Luminate had it peaking at 11.8 million hours, then dropping to 5.9 million hours. Overall, that’s a weak performance. Honestly, it might be the “miss of the week”, especially for a big Netflix series.
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