(Welcome to the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a newsletter on the entertainment industry and business strategy. I write a weekly Streaming Ratings Report and a bi-weekly strategy column, along with occasional deep dives into other topics, like today’s article. Please subscribe.)
After looking at one section of today’s recap of the biggest new shows in 2025, two thoughts stuck out to me:
- Data accuracy matters.
- Streaming is getting really, really cliched.
On the first point, as I wrote last week, I think “authenticity” will determine which media sources we trust in the future, and applying it to data, I should say that “accuracy” will matter just as much.
In this case, I want to highlight the difficulty/danger of using other people’s datasets, especially anything that’s generated by an LLM without oversight. My team and I hand-check every piece of data that we collect, often two or three times (and this can take hours) to ensure accuracy. Not only do I want to trust the data I’m analyzing, but I want you, my readers, to trust it as well. This especially applies to analyses of genres, where, often, I’ll read other people’s analyses and wonder, are those classifications even accurate? Classifying movies and TV shows is often far more art than science…
In the future, accuracy will matter more and more, at least to some people. Sure, many buzzy articles, based on questionable data, will go viral, but I’m betting that my readers want something more accurate.
On the second point, well, stay tuned for which genre is dominating streaming—to the point of being really, really cliched—but receives maybe 1% of the criticism that superhero films have received since the mid-2000s.
Today, we’re continuing my recap of 2025, looking at the top new shows in 2025. Again, as I wrote last time, this analysis isn’t timely, but I like creating a permanent record for the year. More importantly, there are tons of great insights to be gleaned. Trust me, I’m bursting with ideas, observations and spicy hot takes. Like last year, I’ve divided the analysis into “debut” shows—season ones and limited series—and “returning” shows—season two and beyond. We have three key data sources for data: Nielsen, Samba TV and Luminate’s weekly charts. Plus some JustWatch/Reelgood at the very end.
Let’s dive right in!
Nielsen’s Weekly Top Ten Lists
Sometimes, I start with Nielsen’s annual viewership summary…but no debut TV series made that list.
So we’ll start with Nielsen’s weekly top ten lists. They’ve been releasing streaming viewership data the longest, thus it’s the data source that I’m both most familiar with and the one I trust the most. As a reminder, this is Nielsen’s weekly top ten “originals” or “acquired” charts for streaming, which summarize all streaming TV viewership in one week on TV sets in America. Nielsen calls them “living room” TVs, but these TVs could be anywhere in a house. I included all of a show’s viewership, even if the show had some viewership in 2026, for all shows that premiered in 2025. Today, I’m looking at debut shows, or season ones, which includes both mini-series and debut seasons. I included some “second run” shows if they had a simultaneous debut on streaming.
In 2025, eighty debut shows made the Nielsen charts for at least one week. Here’s the top 25:
Overall, the new shows in 2025 feel a bit underwhelming, for two reasons.
First, it was a tight battle for the top spot between Untamed, The Residence, The Hunting Wives (a Starz/Lionsgate acquisition) and The Beast in Me, but they were all between 96.9 and 99.6M hours, which is a huge decline from 2024, when Landman hit 163.9 million hours, Fallout hit 161.1 and five shows had more than 105.2 million hours. Or 2023, when The Night Agent hit 175 million hours. Or 2022, when Wednesday opened to over 350 million hours!
Every data cut, of course, tells a lie—my way of saying, lies, damned lies and statistics—and that really means every data look has its own biases. Adolescence, which dominated the Netflix global charts and had the reputation as the biggest show of the year, only ended up tenth on the list with its limited number of episodes. That said, if you do rank the shows by “views”—total viewership divided by runtime—Adolescence moves up to third.
The top non-Netflix show was The Pitt, which didn’t make the charts at first and grew over time. After that, Hulu’s Paradise. The top comedy was Running Point and the top reality show was Sean Combs: The Reckoning. For reality, that’s about the same as the top reality show last year, Quiet on Set, which had 60.4 million hours. Same for comedy, where the top 2024 comedy was about the same: Nobody Wants This at 58.7 million hours.
But the biggest takeaway is this:
Utter Netflix domination.
Netflix claimed the top eleven spots and thirteen of the top fourteen spots! Last year, two non-Netflix streamers took the crown (Landman and Fallout), but not this year!
Yes, every other streamer had a lackluster or worse 2025. Disney+ and Apple TV+ didn’t have a single new show chart. (Apple TV shows up later, but not Disney+.) Peacock, Hulu and Paramount+ each had one new show make the top 25; HBO Max and Prime Video had two. Not great!
The big question of the streaming wars—which I’ve been writing about for a while now—is whether they’ll get more competitive. Can the other streamers catch up? Well, they won’t if they can’t launch more hit shows. Yes, Netflix’s size gives them an inherent advantage on these charts, but this is probably a symptom of the other streamers pulling back on content spending rather than Netflix’s platform advantages.
Of course, nothing is simple or clear cut, which brings me to my second reason for thinking 2025 was a let-down for new shows: Netflix already cancelled two of their top 25 shows! The second-biggest new show of the year, The Residence, got the axe, most likely due to its large budget and lack of global viewership. The Waterfront also got cancelled. The creator of The Waterfront had kind things to say about Netflix and their process, but I don’t love this choice from Netflix. (Though I get why the showrunner couldn’t say that.) I’m notoriously skeptical about failed shows getting “shopped around” but this isn’t a failed show; as I wrote before, I think rival streamers should pick this one up.
In all, despite having eighteen of the top 25 new shows, Netflix only has six coming back in future years, because most of their hits were limited series:
Eight of the top eleven shows and thirteen of the top 25 shows were limited, anthology or mini-series, though one of those shows (Untamed) has since been renewed for a second season, the Monster anthology series will continue, and there are talks for another season of Adolescence. But still! In terms of new shows, for Netflix’s debut dominance, they only minted six new ongoing shows to help fill out future TV lineups.
Only four weekly-released shows made the top 25, down from five last year. Really, though, this isn’t a story about Netflix, but Prime Video, who is back to binge-releasing its new shows, but not its successful second season shows. (Which you’ll see on the returning charts.) I’d also say this is a sign of how far Disney+ has fallen; they used to regularly put weekly-released superhero shows in the charts.
Ready for a spicy take? Here are the top new shows by language:
So yeah, that chart’s not very useful, is it? No foreign-language shows made the top 25! After all, post-Squid Game, we’re still waiting for the next Squid Game-esque breakout foreign language hit:
Contra the narratives that “All content is global”, it really looks like American customers prefer to watch shows in English. Last year, two new foreign-language shows, Shōgun and Griselda, made the charts, but both were US-produced and starred American actors or actors who were famous in America.
Instead, we have to go to the 49th (49th!) biggest (or at this point, 31st smallest?) show on the chart to even get a foreign language show on here:
Fun fact: it’s not like other foreign, English-language shows do much better, with only four shows (three from the UK and Wayward from Canada) making the charts either.
Okay, on to the spicy topic I mentioned in the intro: genres!
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…
- Which genre dominated the debut TV show charts…
- Good news for original stories (and book authors)…
- Which shows made the top 25 charts for Luminate and Samba TV.
- Over 14 more charts, tables and graphs…
- From five different sources…
- And a lot more…
…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 article about the Streaming Ratings Report, why it matters, why you need it, and why we cover streaming ratings best.
