(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.)
Usually, I wait a bit to self-congratulatorily pat myself on the back and link to all the people who linked to me, since I just shared an update earlier this month.
But what can I say? My article on Netflix’s share of the Nielsen charts going down really resonated with people, including shout outs from Walt Hickey at Numlock, Matt Stoller at Big, Josh Matthews at StreamScoop, Michael Beach at State of the Screens, Kasey Moore at Whats on Netflix, Jen Topping at Business of TV, Travis Clark at the Traverse, Lucas Shaw at Bloomberg, and Jess Weatherbed at The Verge.
That might be a record! Other shouts outs from the past month include…
- Jen Topping of Business of TV followed my lead and wrote about her AI process. I loved seeing this, and I hope it becomes an industry-wide trend! Every writer/reporter/pundit should share how they’re using AI.
- I did an appearance on the must-listen podcast, The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood. Give it a listen!
- Brandon Katz cited my work in the Observer, and Scott Mendelson cited the Argylle Treatment. You should be reading both of them! Also, Reunion Newsletter, a Substack on films, gave me a shout out.
- Finally, Ben Lindbergh wrote about superhero movies, and this paragraph is basically perfect.
“The it’s so over/we’re so back superhero reaction cycle, in which each movie is derided as a death knell for the genre or hailed as triumphant proof of its life, is tiresome and tends toward hyperbole and recency bias. The reality is more nuanced: a partial superhero recovery, not a complete collapse or a full return to form. As Substacker the Entertainment Strategy Guy concluded in February, just before the beginning of the latest flurry of films, “Superheroes continue to be a bankable genre at the box office, but the 2018 to 2019 time frame represented a peak superheroes won’t easily get back to.””
On to this week’s article, which features a heavyweight title fight between Hulu’s The Bear, Disney+’s latest MCU show…and Squid Game! (But you might be shocked at what shows bested Squid Game according to two ratings charts…) All that, plus Prime Video’s new weekly release, another “Trainwreck” special, this time with “poop” in the title, more surprising KPop Demon Hunters numbers, power laws in action, and a smattering of flops and misses.
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 June 23rd to June 29th.)
Television – A Bunch of Heavy Hitters
I’ve ranted on this before, but here it goes again: I don’t understand (some of) the major streamers’ programming strategy.
After a drought the last few weeks, two huge returning shows and a Marvel show squared off this week. Now, I’m not saying everyone should have avoided Netflix’s Squid Game, but I would have given it some breathing room. After all, Netflix did. I’ll let Kasey Moore of What’s-on-Netflix explain:
“Every now and then, Netflix gives a show or movie its full support, clearing the decks clean and giving the show almost an entire week of spotlight. This week, that show is the final season of Squid Game, the K-drama series that occupies both spots on the non-English most-watched shows of all time and is Netflix’s biggest international show of all time.”
That’s a smart strategy in my book. When one show can drive all your engagement for a week, clear out the schedule and lean into it. In contrast, Disney put Ironheart and the third season of The Bear right in its crosshairs.
So how did these three big swings do? We’ll see, starting with the giant of giants, Squid Game.
Squid Game had, as you’d expect, another massive opening. I say “another” not because its first season crushed opening records, as it had a slow burn start.
But you can see that the second season had a strong opening, as did this one, the 26th biggest single week since 2021. Each season has joined the “40 Million Hour” club:
This made me curious how it ranks among all TV series according to the Nielsen top ten list. So this is all viewership on the Nielsen top ten charts going back to 2020, with all seasons added together:
Ozark is the winner! It had a very huge season three back during Covid-19, and Love Is Blind has some of the most episodes for Netflix. Squid Game comes in seventh place, which is more impressive considering how few episodes/seasons it has. (Honestly, this “third season” is really like part II of season two.)
Is there any data that indicates a weakness for Squid Game? Some. Looking at the Nielsen data above, that’s a big drop from season two’s batch of episodes, even accounting for the number of episodes (only seven versus six!). Also, Squid Game didn’t top the Samba TV charts (though it did best The Bear and Ironheart). As a reminder, Samba TV tracks unique households, so having fewer episodes shouldn’t impact this chart (as much, fewer episodes are still correlated with fewer unique viewers, un-intuitively).
It’s Samba TV datecdote was similarly muted, only 1.6 million households in the first three days. Compare that to 2.2 million for Ozark or even 2.2 million for The Perfect Couple in the same time period.
Luminate’s looks weak too. Ginny & Georgia’s third season actually bested Squid Game’s third outing this summer, and The Waterfront tied it. Again, episode counts factor in here (6 for Squid Game versus ten for G&G and eight for The Waterfront), but for such a massive hit, it’s surprising. Worse, the second season, according to Luminate, opened to over 70 million hours, meaning this is a decline of almost 35%
On the plus side, Squid Game still has world-beating IMDb scores, an 8 on 670K reviews!
Disney’s Big Offerings
Disney, via Hulu and Disney+, can go some weeks with no major new TV shows or movies, and then, in the same week, they put a Marvel show up against The Bear, one of Hulu’s workhorse shows. Though that workhorse may be ending the prime of its career, as the fourth season opened below last season’s numbers.
At this point in a show’s life cycle, you want to see the viewership numbers continue to increase season-over-season, and clearly, The Bear hasn’t hit that bar, though we’ll check in on future weeks.
Unfortunately for Hulu, they also keep insisting on binge-releasing this show. That decision baffles me, as this show would benefit greatly from word of mouth, but FX/Hulu seem committed to the binge here, instead of the earned media.
The rest of this article is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so please subscribe.
We can only keep doing this great work with your support. If you’d like to read more about why you should subscribe, please read this post about the Streaming Ratings Report, why you need it, and why we cover streaming ratings best.
