(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.)
Streaming has a “big weeks” problem.
While certain (mostly Holiday) weeks generate the largest TV viewership—typically Fourth of July, Thanksgiving and Christmas week—they’re also tough times to launch new shows, because news coverage declines. As such, the streamers tend to avoid putting out a lot of new titles before the holidays. They also tend to avoid Halloween, since many customers watch horror movies or scary TV shows.
Because of this, a lot of new and returning shows get crammed into a couple of weeks in November. For the two weeks of this Streaming Ratings Report—the weeks of 10-Nov and 17-Nov—it seems like the streamers went all in on the week of 10-Nov, releasing 10 notable new films (four straight-to-streaming and three theatrical), along with a slew of big TV shows like Landman, The Beast in Me and The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. The next week—17-Nov—we had basically one notable new show (A Man on the Inside) and then some smaller documentaries or holiday romcoms.
All to say, we have a lot to get to. I had planned to publish a couple of articles over the holiday break, but this Matthew Yglesias piece and my experience looking at my traffic convinced me that customers don’t really want a lot of new articles in their inboxes. I know I don’t! If anything, getting a bunch of newsletters over the holidays stresses me out.
That said, the Streaming Ratings Report has a schedule to maintain, and today, I’m going to write about a lot of shows and films, which touched on three big EntStrategy Guy themes…
- The “Binge versus Weekly” release debate
- The difference between buzz and viewership
- The Argylle Treatment
I’ll also look at Netflix’s latest foray into animation (In Your Dreams) and what that says about Netflix’s animated efforts following KPop Demon Hunter’s success. We’ll also look at The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, All Her Fault and All’s Fair. All that, plus another Netflix kids show makes the charts, PBS’s first show to make the streaming charts, Thursday Night Football’s stabilizing viewership, a look at SpongeBob versus Bluey, all the flops, bombs and misses (there were a ton!) for the week, over 26 charts and graphs, and a whole lot more.
But we start with one of the biggest shows of 2024, Landman, and how it stacks up to Netflix’s latest buzzy new original.
(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, 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 November 3rd to November 23rd.
You can find a link to my terminology here.)
Television – Landman, The Beast in Me and the Latest Binge versus Weekly Debate
I’m not going to rehash the entire “binge versus weekly” debate this week, and Lord knows, as a data guy, two data points does not a data analysis make.
But I can’t help thinking about it. Especially with these two big shows.
Let’s start with 2024’s second biggest new debut show, the juggernaut from Taylor Sheridan starring Billy Bob Thornton: Landman. The first season got stronger nearly every week, and it looks like season two picks up where the first one left off, viewership-wise. It hit the top spot on Samba TV, and while it gets knocked off by Stranger Things the week of 24-Nov, it regains its crown the first week of December:
Obviously, that longevity on the viewership charts comes from its weekly-release style. While the top Netflix shows come and go, Landman will remain on the charts for weeks to come. Indeed, on Nielsen, Landman looks to be off to a faster start than its first season:
The Nielsen and Samba TV numbers surprised me a pinch, since some of the early data sources (like Samba TV) showed that the second season was down from the first season by 39%. The Paramount datecdote was also “fine”, with only 9.2 million viewers globally in the first two days. Lastly, the IMDb numbers are an elite rating (an 8.2), but not as many reviews (83K) as you’d guess. (My guess is the audience skews older, hence less likely to rate on IMDb.)
Still, this show is an absolute beast for Paramount+. And given how Paramount+ releases it, we’ll be analyzing it a lot more in the weeks to come
Speaking of beasts, Netflix’s The Beast in Me seemed buzzy, given its creative pedigree (Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys), so I thought it might do well. And it does look like one of 2025’s top shows, if just shy of that “elite” category of shows like Bridgerton, Squid Game or Wednesday.
On Samba TV, it made the top ten for at least three weeks, peaking at second place overall. On Luminate, it peaked at a whopping 41.7 million hours. However, on Nielsen, it started at 15.9 million hours and then got to 27.7 million hours. That last number is good for eighth place through two weeks in 2025:
All in all, that’s a great opening for a thriller like this, though it doesn’t look like it will win the prize for biggest debut series in 2025…which isn’t that much of a knock!
Thus, I still believe, especially with the Landman example this week, that Netflix is leaving some viewership on the metaphorical table by not putting their shows out weekly. A twist and turns thriller like this is perfect to be dissected online, which in turn convinces more folks to watch the show.
Television – The Difference Between “Buzz” and Viewership: All Her Fault vs. All’s Fair, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives vs. The Kardashians
Want to know the other subject in TV I can’t ever stop thinking about?
Buzz versus viewership.
Lots of shows get lots of buzz. And listen, it’s better to get buzz than to not get it. But buzz doesn’t always translate to viewership and vice versa.
For example, last issue, I discussed Peacock’s All Her Fault, a show that has very quietly become a legitimate hit for Peacock. But I didn’t dive deep because I wanted to see how it fared in its second week.
And it fared terrifically, again, without much buzz. On Luminate, it peaks at 33.3 million hours, the biggest non-Netflix show for the two weeks of this report:
On Nielsen, it had a binge-release curve of 7.5 to 14.5 to 9.7 million hours. Compared to other Nielsen performances, that isn’t great, but it is Peacock’s biggest season one show…
This show seriously impressed me on the viewership charts. It barely has any stars to its name and it’s on a very small streamer, yet it’s crushing the competition.
And it’s doing it all without a lot of “buzz”. It’s not the most exact science, but I searched Google for articles on it, and All Her Fault got much less coverage than other buzzy shows. Seriously, my researcher found exactly one news article on it and almost no critical reviews or recaps or anything on pop culture websites. Again, the goal for any streamer is actual eyeballs watching shows. To paraphrase another aphorism, you can’t eat buzz in streaming. You need actual viewership, and All Her Fault delivered for Peacock.
Contrast this with Kim Kardashian’s last two shows for Hulu. All’s Fair came out 4-Nov, and we haven’t seen it make a single viewership chart we track, not Nielsen, Samba TV or Luminate. None. Nada. Zilch. Same for the latest season of The Kardashians.
Yet it feels like both of the Kardashian shows “win” on the buzz metrics, especially on social media. If you asked folks, they may have heard of these shows, and they definitely have heard of Kim Kardashian. To be fair, as Lesley Goldberg’s article in The Ankler noted, All’s Fair got a lot of buzz mainly for being infamously bad TV and its terrible critical reviews.
And it seemed like every pop culture website wrote an article on All’s Fair.
Now maybe All’s Fair will grow its audience and show up on the charts in a few weeks—it was released weekly—but color me I’m skeptical. (Disney also put out a datecdote that the show had 3 million viewers in three days, which was big for a non-Disney branded show, but that’s still a weak number for them.) And for a show that had a reported $11 to $12 million budget, that’s not great.
Again, you can’t “eat” buzz, meaning you can’t really monetize it. Streamers make their money from paying subscribers, and subscribers pay for shows they watch. In that sense, All Her Fault crushes All’s Fair.
Now, a show that may combine buzz and actual numbers is Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. Hulu had a season just last June, and I love this quick turnaround for a reality show like this. The latest season had opening weeks of 10.9 and 11.7 million hours, which is good, but not great. It also missed Samba TV, though made it on Luminate up to 16.2 million hours.
So a few final notes. First, all these buzzy shows discussed so far had binge releases. Personally, I think crime shows that have a chance to be buzzy should be put out weekly by default, but clearly, Peacock is moving towards the binge model. I’d also put out popular returning shows, and for Hulu, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives clearly qualifies. (Though I do love it comes out twice a year for Hulu.)
Second, you’ll note that for all of All’s Fair‘sinitial buzz, All Her Fault ended up passing it on the Google Trends charts, probably based on strong word of mouth.
Lastly, speaking of buzz, HBO Max’s Heated Rivalry looks to be the buzziest non-Netflix show of recent memory, which I also included on the above chart.
I’m very curious to see how Heated Rivalry grows. We haven’t seen it on any of the preliminary viewership charts, but in terms of Google interest, it actually bests All Her Fault, so we’ll see if that translates to actual viewership.
Quick Notes on TV
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.
