(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.)
Occasionally, you read an article and it feels like the writer has read your mind. Karl Bode did just that in “‘CEO Said A Thing” Journalism”, complaining about (mostly tech) reporters writing uncritical articles repeating what CEOs say, and I couldn’t agree with it more. Tonally, he’s much harsher than I tend to be, but the general take is spot on: reporters/journalists shouldn’t merely transcribe the utterances of CEOs.
Don’t be a stenographer for the powerful!
I see it in my corner of the media world all the time. At its worst, the trades just run this exact type of story, usually “CEO said something at a Conference”. Worse, some articles just consist of asking “insiders” what they think about news headlines. And often these insiders just repeat what they’ve read in the trades, leading to an odd self-enforcing feedback loop. And the reporters rarely check back in to see if those insiders got their predictions right.
Obviously, the media landscape needs a balance of in-depth reporting, insider reporting, and analysis, but it needs to be balanced with skepticism or, in my case, data, to test the hypotheses and predictions.
Everyone needs to be way, way more skeptical! Especially of the powerful!
Okay, on to this week’s issue. We’re starting with a mini-dive into HBO (Max) and their surprisingly strong start to the year, then I’m taking a look at a bunch of Oscar films. All that, plus a new Guy Ritchie show on Prime Video, a new CGI-dinosaurs nature docu-series, the return of Peacock’s Ted, a new Netflix half-hour dramedy stumbles, an Apple TV show un-flops itself, Netflix’s big new action flick, updates on Paradise, The Lincoln Lawyer, The Night Agent and Cross, all the flops, bombs and misses, 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, 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 2nd to March 8th, 2026.
You can find a link to my terminology here.)
Television – An HBO Check-In
HBO/HBO Max is poised for a big year:
- They started 2026 with A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, and while it was made for a much lower cost than other Game of Thrones shows, it’s still a GoT show.
- The Pitt returned in January, a show that won multiple awards in 2025.
- Euphoria returns in the spring, starring arguably the biggest under-age-30 actress working today.
- The third season of House of the Dragon, a very expensive Game of Thrones show, is slated for the summer.
- And they finish the year with a show about a boy named Harry Potter.
Since it’s April, we have data for two of those big swings, and I’d say one met expectations, and one show far exceeded them. To use a baseball analogy, if a few of those shows are home runs and maybe two are grand slams, then HBO will have a very good year. If HBO’s other fare can simply be “good”—hitting singles and doubles—then they’ll have a great year. And I’d argue that those other shows are, indeed, hitting.
Pulling the data for today’s article, I realized that four (four!) HBO shows made one of the viewership charts over the last six weeks or so. That’s a good run! So let’s talk about the four shows on the charts, one which wrapped up its run, one of which is still going terrifically strong, and two which just debuted.
We’ll start with A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, a show that has conflicting data points for it, but I’d still call it a hit for them. It never made the Nielsen charts, but it did have a short runtime and it came out weekly. (It also wasn’t eligible for Luminate, since it came out on pay TV first.)
It did, though, crush the Samba TV charts. It ranks 14th all-time among TV shows. (Exactly 320 TV seasons have made the Samba TV charts at some point.) That’s obviously terrific. It’s even more impressive because of its short weekly run, only making the charts six times.
It also had terrific HBO datecdotes. While I tend to eschew datecdotes, HBO has put out enough of these—they don’t publish all their data like Netflix, but they do put out more datecdotes than anyone else—that we can make some reasonable comparisons. HBO moved to the “first three days” metric in 2025, and the AKoSK finale ended up with 9.2 million viewers in the penultimate episode and 9.5 million viewers in the finale. That’s top of their charts using that metric.
Here’s how that stacks up to other shows in my data set:
That 9.5 million households number actually explains why this show didn’t make the acquired charts. With a 30-minute-long finale episode, that’s roughly 4 million or so hours of live viewership, with presumably twice that in catch-up. Given the last place show is at 8.7 million hours on the acquired charts, AKoSK didn’t make the Nielsen charts because its episodes weren’t long enough. But that also explains how it made the Samba TV charts, which track unique households instead. (This is why I love using multiple data sources.)
While the first season was made for a more limited budget with shorter run times, we’ll see if HBO leans in to make future episodes longer and/or seasons with more episodes. At the least, I hope they keep the show coming out regularly, specifically every year or so.
The Pitt, on the other hand, is a smash hit by nearly any metric. The latest season did 18.5 million hours on Nielsen, and its finale still doesn’t stream until 16-April, so it’s going to keep piling up hours viewed every week.
In fact, you can see that The Pitt now rivals House of the Dragon and The Last of Us in terms of total hours viewed, and it accomplishes this fact as an HBO Max-only show…which is monumentally impressive.
It also continues to climb the “season two all-time viewership” charts, now up to eighth place.
Yes, there is the big caveat that this show has simply a ton of episodes. But that’s the opposite of a double-edged sword: in this case, the huge volume of (relatively affordable) episodes means when a customer gets hooked, they keep watching, returning to HBO Max (in particular) week after week. Going back to the dawn of broadcast and cable television, that’s the main job of hit shows: to bring people in to watch other shows too!
Notably, according to HBO datecdotes, episode six only had 7 million viewers in the first three days, compared to A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ 9.5 million. This is where having many more episodes for customers to binge is driving up its total viewership. On Samba TV, The Pitt has also climbed up the charts, making it to ten weeks total, tied for third all-time.
Just look: it’s the second most-watched show by unique households on streaming. That’s a huge feat for HBO Max.
As you can see, two other HBO shows made the Samba TV charts: the Steve Carell/Bill Lawrence comedy, Rooster and the Linda Cardellini, David Harbour and HBO-regular Jason Bateman dramedy, DTF St. Louis. Both made Samba TV, but didn’t make other viewership charts. (Again, the Nielsen acquired charts are tough to crack and Luminate doesn’t track HBO shows.) Datecdote-wise, both are in different categories from The Pitt or AKoSK, with 2.4 in three days for Rooster and 2.5 for DTF St. Louis.
Overall, I’d say neither is a miss, but also I wouldn’t call them huge hits. I don’t think they’re expensive, but Steve Carell, Bill Lawrence, Jason Bateman, and David Harbour don’t come cheap either. So I’d call this an unknown, but tending toward the “affordable for streaming nowadays” side. Both are probably singles, just maybe doubles, to continue my baseball analogy from above.
To bring back to my initial point, if these shows just do okay to good for HBO, then HBO overall had a really strong start to the year, and we’ll see if the rest of their shows continue that momentum.
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.
