(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.)
Today, I deliver on a long-promised topic.
As I wrote when Beast Games first started—the week of 16-Dec, mind you—I wanted to check in on this somewhat buzzy but definitely important series after it ended. Why is this show “important”? Well, damn near every outlet in Hollywood media is constantly touting the “YouTube versus Netflix/creators versus old Hollywood” showdown, and this pretty traditional reality show comes from a creator who is easily the biggest YouTube streamer in America/the world.
But I called its opening “mid” back in January.
Yet that show ended up having a long run on the Nielsen charts, at least for a reality series, especially one on Prime Video. So I vowed to check in on it again. Then The Pitt started in January, and it kept chugging along, making the Samba TV charts and eventually making Nielsen too, and I thought it would make a fun comp to Beast Games. So I vowed to check in on it too. Then Severance came out and had a huge run on the Nielsen charts. As did Reacher. And The White Lotus. I wanted to check back in on all these shows.
What do they all have in common? They came out weekly. And the pace of the streaming ratings report often doesn’t give me the time to analyze these shows’ full runs.
So that’s the plan today: to look at four debut series (Landman, Paradise, The Pitt and Beast Games), two sophomore seasons (Severance and 1923) and four third seasons (Reacher, The White Lotus, and Yellowjackets). I’ve analyzed some of these shows in-depth before—Landman in particular got a lot of coverage in my annual recap for 2024—but this issue will put it into even better context.
Here’s the key chart, total Nielsen hours by show:
The big question for me today is, “Is this a hit?” Now, the term “hit” is itself vague. In the past, I’ve definitely called out shows for not being hits. And I also wrote that the WGA definition provides a pretty good barometer for what’s a hit, and in past calculations, that means that only about 14% of shows are actually hits in a given year. But I’ll let you in on a secret: I have a plan to more rigorously define “hit” going forward, quantifying it for the Nielsen data set. I’ve already written the article, but it hasn’t gone out yet.
The point is that, crunching the numbers, shows in the top 15% of TV shows on the Nielsen charts are “hits”. Shows in the 15-25% range are still good, popular even, but they aren’t “hits”. And as the chart above shows, some of these shows are clearly hits and others aren’t. Let’s review, starting with “debut” or season one/limited series.
The Overall Weekly Performance
It’s worth looking at the top five weekly season one shows of all time for context, which include House of the Dragon, The Last of Us, The Rings of Power, Loki, and, now Landman:
The top shows aren’t just a bit bigger, but multiples bigger than the rest. So yeah, you may want to call Paradise, Beast Games, or The Pitt “hits”, but I’d say they’re just popular. The term “hit” needs to mean something, and you can see that Landman or The Last of Us have viewership in the 150 million-plus hour range, three times as much as these shows.
Those are hit shows, the others just…aren’t.
Here’s the weekly look to see how those shows accumulated viewership week to week:
Now, I will add that all of these shows got renewed, and for popular shows, that’s smart. I’d even call these shows successful, with the caveat that if your budget is too high, then you have to be elite to justify it. (That applies to one show in particular down below.) Viewership is one piece of the equation; price is the other. Add them together, and you have either “profit” or “ROI” for each show, and obviously, streamers/studios should only make profitable shows or shows with a good return on investment.
For today’s article, I’m primarily using Nielsen’s data, since it goes back to 2020, unlike any other data set. For the debut shows, while I tend to hate them, I also mentioned each company’s “datecdote” they dropped, since they all released a few. I’ll also use some IMDb data.
Lastly, if you’re curious, Squid Game: The Challenge is Netflix’s most popular debut weekly show. But since the biggest streamer rarely releases anything weekly, this is mostly a non-Netflix conversation today!
Debut Series
Landman: The Biggest Weekly Show of Them All
We’re just getting started with this issue, but the rest is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so if you’d like to find out…
- Three strategic takeaways from Landman’s success…
- What The Pitt might say about the future of streaming…
- What popular show’s budget is a huge problem…
- What smaller streamer show put up huge numbers…
- Ten more charts and graphs
- And a lot more…
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