(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.)
If somehow you missed it—and if you subscribe to this newsletter, how could you?—I really enjoyed writing about Beast Games’ uninspiring ratings on Monday. Frankly, if I had written the reverse (“MrBeast is huge! What a hit!”) it would likely have travelled farther in the entertainment ecosystem, especially since pro-Creator Economy articles get clicks.
I couldn’t write that, though. I gotta write what the data tells me to write. And there is very, very, very little data that that show is a hit. But that narrative just isn’t out there.
So anyways, on to more data! This week, I look at a few big returning shows, including one quiet hit and two buzzy “okays”. And Disney tries to reverse its feature films slide. All that, plus why the Winter Olympics were more popular this year, Amazon diving back into the book world, Hulu’s slow burning hit, one of the weirdest new TV shows I’ve seen in a while, an extremely controversial “Miss of the Week”, debunking a Ted Sarandos quote with data, Netflix TV seasons are getting shorter, 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 9th to March 15th, 2026
You can find a link to my terminology here.)
Television – The Battle of the Returning TV Shows
Netflix has a seemingly inexhaustible amount of shows to put out there in the world. No, seriously, here’s the Nielsen top ten list this week:
In one week, Virgin River returned for its (checks notes) seventh season! And One Piece, the (hit?) anime show, returned for its second season. Netflix has been putting out big new shows every week, going from Bridgerton to The Lincoln Lawyer to The Night Agent and back to Bridgerton. Plus, Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives returned for its fourth (still binge-released) season as well. So let’s check in on this battle of returning shows.
We’ll start with the longest-running show: Virgin River. It has reached seven season territory on Netflix, a rarity for that streamer. Weirder, this long-running show has almost no critical reviews. Its Metacritic page still doesn’t have a score it has so few reviews! Even if its ratings have begun to slide, after a certain point, I’m not surprised since this show has run for so long.
Its current season is down from past seasons (yes, that story again), to 23.1 million hours, compared to previous seasons of 32.0 million and 30.4 million opening weeks.
We’ll see how long this season lasts on the Nielsen charts. Season six lasted for a very solid six weeks. On Samba TV, it grows from fifth place to third place, which tracks with the Nielsen data. Meanwhile, on Luminate, it got up to 40.0 million hours, which is tremendous. On IMDb, the show sits at a very good 7.4 on 59K reviews, even more impressive for this genre (romance/soapy).
Conversely, One Piece is a very buzzy TV show—the articles about it on pop culture websites are legion—and I always seem to remember it as a smash hit, but whenever I dig into the numbers, I’m always a pinch underwhelmed. (As a reminder, anime is very popular online; less so with viewers.) Here’s a fun fact: the previous season of One Piece came out in August of 2023, one week before the fifth season of Virgin River. That’s right: two seasons of Virgin River have come out since One Piece released its first season.
Anyways, the first season opened to 21.9 million hours (good!) and this one did even better, up to 27.0 million hours according to Nielsen. So maybe the “season over season slide” isn’t real here…
Yay! The numbers are up. That said, the previous season only made the charts for four weeks, which underwhelmed me at the time. My theory is One Piece fans over-index on binge-watching.
Some other numbers are disappointing, too. This time, the current season missed the Samba TV charts entirely. (This would imply a lot of the Nielsen viewership is folks starting season one for the first time, or rewatching the series, or maybe watching on iPads/tablets.) Luminate was even more muted, with only 15.5 million hours for the current season and then 7.3 million in its second week…then off! Season one didn’t show back up on those charts either. (Compare that 15.5 million hours to Virgin River’s 40 million.) That’s an interesting data divergence!
The global data—which I don’t dive into often, but try to keep in mind if there’s a notable data divergence—also tells a grim story. In this case, the decline in terms of “views” is real, as noted by Kasey Moore of Whats-On-Netflix:
A third season is on the way regardless, but we’ll need to check back in on this one. I’d call this a good to very good start, but maybe shy of elite. I’d keep my eyes on season three in 2027, though, to see if it grows or shrinks. In particular, this show likely has an expensive budget. If it shrinks too much more, the show could end early, possibly ending with its fourth season.
And that leaves The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, where the drama on screen has now matched the drama off the screen. (For those who didn’t see it, one of the stars was set to star in The Bachlorette, but that show was pulled from the air due to very serious domestic assault charges.)
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