(Welcome to the “Most Important Story of the Week”, my bi-weekly strategy column analyzing the most important (but often not buzziest) news story of the last two weeks. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. Please subscribe.)
Last week, I looked at the films that topped the charts in 2024. Today, we’re analyzing the top TV shows, but fair warning, we’ve got dozens of charts to get through, cutting the data every which way, so I’m breaking this article into two parts. In particular, my analysis of Nielsen’s three weekly top ten charts will have its own article like last year, coming Monday.
Today, I’m looking at…
- Nielsen’s Annual Rankings, the renamed “Artey’s”
- Luminate’s Year-End List and weekly charts
- Samba TV’s Weekly Charts
- IMDB
- JustWatch
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The ARTEY Awards (a.k.a. Nielsen’s Year-End Charts)
We start off with Nielsen’s annual charts, now dubbed the ARTEY Awards, which combines all of a show’s viewership over 2024.
Originals
Let’s start with the “Original”—meaning usually first-run, exclusive shows, usually branded as originals—charts:
Bridgerton is a juggernaut. But I’d highlight Love is Blind as well, which had two seasons last year. Season 6 was huge last spring, then season 7 was solid as well. As we’ll see, though, some shows are at a disadvantage on this metric, especially if they came out in December, like Squid Game’s second season. (Trust me, it will show up on the Nielsen weekly charts analysis.) The Lincoln Lawyer did very well, especially since it came out so late in the year; it was likely helped by having some popular previous seasons. Conversely, Fool Me Once had a literal full year to accumulate viewership. (And I honestly wonder how many people remember this show.)
Perhaps the most ironic result—off the news that Jen Salke just departed Amazon MGM Studios—is that Amazon had three entries in the top ten! (Reminder: it’s all about your hit rate and budgets.)
We now have five years of annual data from Nielsen; here’s how it looks all-time, chronologically:
Riffing off of what I just wrote in this week’s Streaming Ratings Report, is this chart getting more colorful? To put it another way, are the streaming wars finally getting more competitive? If you look at the share of the originals charts, then, maybe:
(And one of the historically stronger producers of splashy genre TV—Disney+—got blanked in the top ten this year.)
We can go one step deeper too, and look at not just who streams which shows, but who owns what shows, and that has another interesting result:
According to this look, it looks like it!
The annual charts can be biased towards shows with more episodes and longer run-times, so Nielsen added some additional “award” winners in specific categories—top half-hour and top reality/unscripted—so here’s the chart above expanded with those categories:
Acquired Shows
Okay, on to the acquired charts. Reminder: acquired TV shows air/stream elsewhere first, then head to a streamer. This look mostly captures viewership for broadcast shows that usually have run for literally decades.
Now this chart is crazy colorful! Hulu had a huge year, with a share of six shows in the top ten, but Paramount isn’t too far behind.
Bluey is utterly dominant. Just how dominant? I’ll go ahead and send you to Emily Horgan’s newsletter for a truly excellent data cut by episode. And SpongeBob Squarepants popped up at tenth! Animated kids shows for the win!
Adult animation also did very, very well, representing the third and fourth most-streamed shows. Fun fact from Nielsen’s annual report: Four animated adult shows—Family Guy, Bob’s Burgers, The Simpsons and South Park—finished in the top thirty last year. And four procedurals made the top ten: Grey’s Anatomy, NCIS, Law & Order: SVU and Criminal Minds.
The obvious takeaway? Having lots and lots of episodes leads to lots and lots of viewership.
Those shows are a good reminder that procedurals/crime shows and sitcoms do very well on the Acquired charts, and if you combine the Original/Acquired charts, then sort it by genre, that becomes abundantly clear:
And here’s that look for the last five years:
For a couple of years, dramas and genre shows did really well, especially in 2022 when Stranger Things and Wednesday boosted the “genre” (meaning sci-fi, horror and fantasy shows) genre.
Nielsen also provided some bonus datecdotes on some really old shows:
Gunsmoke? What the hell is that? I’m just kidding, I know what Gunsmoke is, but yeah, I never would have guessed that the 1950s-1960s-era Western put up viewership like that year after year.
Okay, let’s take a look at the acquired charts over the years:
Suits completely fell off the charts, as did Cocomelon!
Likely, this is Hulu’s fault.
You might notice that Hulu went from one show in 2021 to six shows this year. This doesn’t reflect a change in viewership per se, but a data measurement change. Prior to 2024, Nielsen didn’t release data on day-after-air streaming viewership for Hulu shows, so series like Family Guy and Bob’s Burgers weren’t eligible for these charts.
Top Luminate Shows in 2024
Okay, onto other data sources!
Luminate—who started publishing a top ten list for originals by season in March—released a year-end report and their top shows were…
Luminate subtitled this section, “Top 2024 TV Series Led By Netflix, Taylor Sheridan”, and that feels like a fair summary of the year.
There are some quirks in this list. Again, Fool Me Once clearly benefited from coming out earlier in the year. There’s also a bit of variation in this chart compared to Nielsen’s, not just because it’s by season, to which I say:
That’s great!
It’s good to have multiple data sources and not lean on one source of information. Looking at all of the data sources together gives a holistic, more complete view of the streaming wars.
As I said above, Luminate started releasing weekly top ten lists midway through 2024, with data starting on 8-Mar. Here’s how the season 1 shows released in 2024 performed:
Wow. I mean, wow. Landman. It’s miles ahead of everything else. Also note that Fallout in particular is penalized by the incomplete time frame. This is also the first appearance of an Apple TV+ show (Presumed Innocent) on the charts, one of their better performing 2024 shows.
Next up, here are the returning shows on the Luminate Top 10 charts:
Two Netflix shows, Squid Game and Bridgerton, took the top two spots. Netflix did much better by this look, but Paramount+ is still really strong. This is also the first appearance in this article of a Hulu original, The Bear, on the charts.
Lastly, if you want to know the “bear” case for Prime Video’s Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, this is it. As we’ll see in other data sources, LoTR: RoP sits just outside of the top ten in most metrics, but it’s absolutely one of the costliest shows on TV.
IMDB – TV Shows
IMDb is my preferred “interest” metric—meaning it doesn’t measure viewership but customer interest in movies and TV shows—since it clearly has the most usage/voting compared to other systems, especially Rotten Tomatoes. (For film, I’ll admit that I prefer Cinemascore, but that only covers theatrically-released titles.)
Here are the winners for 2024 (with 2023 included for reference):
HBO is the big winner, with three shows in the top five. And all three have elite scores from users. And once again, Prime Video had a strong showing. You can also see the decline of Disney+/Hulu, going from five shows in the top ten to only one this year.
To show how those page views translate to ratings, here’s a scatterplot of ratings vs number of reviews:
HBO shows hit that sweet spot of both lots of reviews and really good scores.
TV Time Charts
Next up, TV Time. Reminder: TV Time tracks customer interest in TV shows, so this isn’t a viewership metric. We now have data from them going back three years.
Here’s the list of winners for 2024 according to TV Time’s weekly charts:
Apple TV+ does particularly well in terms of generating interest for their shows, though some of this may be a reflection of TV Time’s user base skewing toward Apple users, since their shows outperform on this chart. Same goes for Disney+.
Here’s their charts going back in time for three years:
No shows dominated in 2024 like How I Met Your Father and Ted Lasso did in 2023. I’d add, you can also see the “fall of Disney+” in terms of interest here too.
(Note: TV Time missed publishing their charts for several weeks in 2024, which could impact a few of the winners above, though not likely enough to move any of the top ten out of the top 25.)
JustWatch Year-End List
Here’s JustWatch’s end-of-the-year recap for TV shows:
Like TV Time, this is an interest chart, so Netflix doesn’t do as well because they operate as the “default streamer”, so fewer users have to seek out their shows with a service like this.
One show stood out to me: From on MGM+. It did so, so well on the interest charts this year. Nielsen doesn’t track data from MGM+, and I’d love to see their viewership. The size of MGM+ is also an open question, given that we haven’t had an update on MGM+ née EPIX’s subscribers since 2022, when it had, apparently 85 million mostly pay TV subscribers. At some point, I’d expect that MGM+ ends up getting folded into Prime Video, à la IMDb TV, er Amazon Freevee, er Freevee.
Okay, that was a ton of data, but it’s just the first half! Next week, I’m looking at the weekly Nielsen charts, slicing and dicing the data every which way I can, including by genre, streamer, IP, release style and more.
