(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 get to today’s Streaming Ratings Report, it’s time for some more shoutouts from other newsletters and websites to yours truly. Between my second appearance on The Town, the newsletter ecosystem’s continued growth, and some articles that really resonated with readers, my writing has experienced an explosion of interest recently. I even found a journal article that cited my work!
I feel like I’m finally making a dent in the entertainment industry ecosystem/narratives, and it’s all very motivating! (If you or your podcast or your newsletter shout me out, drop me a line to let me know!)
The best part is that many of these shoutouts are must-read articles anyway…
- Over at the Observer, Brandon Katz wrote a great article on “The Decline of Originality in Hollywood: a Look at the Numbers”, and it really seemed to resonate with people, including No Film School and others on social media.
- A number of outlets have cited my articles on the best (or worst) performing TV shows and films in 2024, including my favorite MMA newsletter, The MMA Draw, and my favorite video game newsletter, GameDiscoverCo. Also, Will Harrison at Brands to Fans (another great entertainment industry newsletter) cited my stats on action films in a fun analysis of Liam Neeson, Jason Statham and Gerard Butler’s movies. (I’ll have more from that article later on.)
- Will Harrison also cited my work in his article on faith-based films. He’s more bullish on this genre than I am, but he makes a good case for the genre. Looking at both sides of something is good data analysis!
- Simon Carless of GameDiscoverCo also wrote an excellent article on how the trade wars might impact the video game industry, and after citing my article, broke down the video game industry’s vulnerability to digital tariffs. (He makes a great point on how it’s much harder to figure out what country a video game is from.) Underexposed also gave that article a shoutout. And Across the Movie Aisle also cited that article.
- Two podcasts shouted me out recently: The Rest Is Entertainment recommended this newsletter, and Morning Somewhere cited my article on Moana 2 versus The Electric State.
- Finally, Walt Hickey at Numlock News cited me not once, but twice in one week! First, he shared my Ankler article on “eventpoles”, then he shared my analysis on Moana 2.
- I loved this MMA Draw article on where UFC TV rights could go next, citing my analysis on Netflix’s financial situation, which more analysts need to take into account.
- Yesterday, I had the immense pleasure of appearing on the Hang Up and Listen podcast to discuss my Caitlyn Clark-Formula 1 article. Neil Paine, formerly of FiveThirtyEight, also linked to that piece.
- Finally, Hamish McKenzie of Substack just linked to me in his article on the future of media!
On to the ratings. First off, we’re talking Adolescence versus The Residence. Regarding Adolescence, I wonder if, for the third year in a row, a buzzy new TV show’s hype matches the viewership. For The Residence, I wonder if it’s a rare Shondaland misfire. (Expectations for Shonda Rhimes are so high, anything short of elite is a miss.)
We’re also going to look at Wicked versus Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, Anora’s debut on Hulu, two big questions marks from Hulu and Paramount+, Severance’s big run on the Nielsen charts, a new soap opera, big time MLB viewership numbers, all the flops, bombs, and misses for the week, and a whole lot more.
Let’s dive right in.
(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 March 17th to March 23rd.)
Television – Adolescence vs The Residence
The spring comes, and as the rain ebbs and the flowers bloom…
…Netflix releases a limited series that goes viral.
In 2023, we had Beef. In 2024, we had Baby Reindeer. In 2025, it’s Adolescence.
Adolescence is the hit series of the moment, seemingly dominating the “conversation”. It has an 8.2 on IMDb on 178K reviews, which is phenomenal. It also has a 90 on Metacritic, which means critics love it too. As I do for all these shows—since it’s sorta my thing—I gotta ask: do the viewership numbers match the hype?
Since Adolescence is only four episodes long, it means that my usual method of looking at “total hours viewed” by week may not capture how well it’s doing. But the other new big show of the week—The Residence—provides an interesting comp. The Residence only has a 7.8 on IMDb on a mere 30K reviews. But it’s eight episodes long.
So first, here’s a comparison of both shows’ total hours. (This includes data from the week of 24-March, since I have that Nielsen data.)
Now, here’s the “views” count, where total hours is divided by run-time, to make things apples-to-apples. (As a reminder, this isn’t how many times folks actually watched or a proxy for viewers, at all. But it accounts for total hours available.)
As expected, Adolescence closes the gap and then some when view counts are factored in. Or we could just look at the number of episodes. You see this in the rankings too, as Adolescence goes from being the 42nd biggest season one or limited series show in three weeks by total hours to the 11th biggest by views. The Residence, on the other hand, drops from 18th place by hours to 34th place just looking at views (in two weeks of data) among first seasons.
Sorting it a different way, Adolescence is the winner for TV shows with only four episodes, but it’s mostly competing with true crime docu-series, whereas The Residence comes in at eighth place (competing against real TV shows):
I would add, using just “interest” data in terms of search, the two shows are closer than you’d guess, along with some other new shows from the streamers:
So both shows did well in America, and look to be hits, depending on whether you care about total hours (The Residence) or views (Adolescence), according to Nielsen’s data. The Samba TV data is more even, as the shows switched sports on the top ten charts (see below), peaking at third and fourth place respectively, but both were bested by The White Lotus and 1923. The Luminate data tells a similar story to Nielsen, with The Residence garnering over 30 million hours, but Adolescence only had just over 25 million hours.
Internationally, one show crushed it, and the other didn’t. I don’t normally dive into this data, but I saw two stories that felt worth pointing out. Adolescence did very well in the UK, and Marion Ranchet shared data that it became the first streaming show to top the BARB UK charts. (BARB is the UK Nielsen equivalent.) By views, Adolescence is now Netflix’s third biggest show all time.
The Residence doesn’t look like it will hit the same heights. Kasey Moore of Whats-On-Netflix actually pointed out that it’s below “The Obliterated Line”, a threshold I defined after the seemingly okay show Obliterated got cancelled.
So I wouldn’t call The Residence a miss or a flop, since everything Shonda touches does okay at a minimum, but globally, it’s not a hit either.
Quick Notes on TV
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