(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.)
Before we get going, spare me two quick asides, one on writing and one on websites.
First, I’ve noticed that I personalize companies, writing “they” instead of “it” (or “their” instead of “its”) when writing about streamers or media conglomerates. This might be a usage “mistake”, but I’m not changing my style anytime soon. It might be slightly idiosyncratic, but idiosyncratic choices serve to make writing more interesting, in my opinion.
Second, have you ever noticed that some websites, instead of dating their articles, automatically write “X days ago” instead of an actual date? YouTube does it (forcing you to click the description to find the actual date), but another beloved sports website (which provides invaluable sports viewership data) also does this. It makes it so hard to find dates for events, having to calculate what “two weeks ago” actually means. Not sure there’s anything to be done about that particular content management service, I just wanted to note my relatively minor objection to it.
On to this week’s issue. On the film side, rated-R comedies have struggled in theaters, but guess what? They struggle on streaming, too.
Plus, I’ll look at Netflix’s poor week on the charts, The Boys strong second week (along with another Prime Video superhero continuing to put up strong numbers), good news for Apple TV(+) on one hand, bad news for Apple TV on another, what buzzy studio struggles to make streaming hits, underperforming reality shows, another mega Taylor Sheridan hit show (but it’s not on streaming!), the DC vs. Marvel comic book sales battle, all the flops, bombs and misses, and a whole lot more.
But we start with TV, and HBO’s strong start to 2026. 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 Apr 13th to Apr 19th 2026.
You can find a link to my terminology here.)
Television – HBO Started The Year Strong…And Isn’t Stopping
For all the talk about various streamers having bad starts to the year—and I basically mean all my writing so far this year —one streamer/company has impressed me: HBO. They ended December with an extremely buzzy show, kicked the year off with A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, then rode The Pitt’s fifteen-episode second season to weekly chart dominance, and now they are going right into Euphoria. That’s a strong run, so let’s talk about HBO shows, since one ended (The Pitt) and one just started (Euphoria) the week of this report.
Starting with the epic run for The Pitt, this show topped the Nielsen charts this week, in its fifteenth week of release:
Yep, The Pitt hit 23.1 million hours in the week of its finale. Now, a lot of folks saw Nielsen’s chart comparing season one to season two of The Pitt. Here’s that look (which includes the weeks The Pitt’s first season missed the charts):
I saw that chart lots of places. But what I didn’t see was an analysis of the biggest second seasons of all time on the Nielsen top ten charts! So here you go:
In my mind, this accomplishment is even more impressive.
It’s bigger than other mega-hit shows like Wednesday, Squid Game, The Mandalorian, Bridgerton, and more. Plus, The Pitt is just 4.8 million hours shy of Landman’s second season. Given how well it did this week, I bet it makes the Nielsen charts next week, and that means it will almost assuredly displace Landman as the biggest second season according to the Nielsen top ten charts since 2020. Yes, The Pitt has a lot more episodes than any of those shows, but in this case, that’s a feature, not a bug.
What a monster show.
Other data backs this up. Samba TV had The Pitt as the top show on streaming for the last few weeks. They also put out that the finale was up 87% from season one and 13% from the start of season two, for a whopping 5.1 million households in its first six days. Those are big, big numbers. It also did really well on Luminate, with season one and season two making those charts for the last several weeks.
And yes, we got the obligatory HBO datecdote. The Pitt finished with 9.7 million viewers in its first three days, making it the biggest show since the second half of 2025 in terms of viewers for one episode in three days. (HBO changed metrics after The Last of Us, changing from “first day” viewership to “first three days”. I’m going to try to get some historical data to expand this comparison in a future issue.)
And a new HBO show made the Nielsen charts as well, the aforementioned Euphoria in third place.
This show remains very popular, even with its gigantic gaps between seasons. It debuted in 2019…but has only put out three seasons since then. Huh. I don’t agree with that strategy, but in this rare case, it’s not hurting the viewership. Euphoria is already climbing the Samba TV charts, up to second place (see above), and this week it finally made the Nielsen charts with 9.3 million hours. (The previous season missed the acquired charts.) It also got the HBO datecdote treatment, with 8.5 million viewers for the premiere in three days. Episode two did 8.5 million viewers, too, according to HBO.
Now, Euphoria will have trouble catching The Pitt’s total performance, since this season will only have eight episodes, and we’ll see how long it lasts on both the Samba TV and Nielsen charts. (It won’t surprise me if it takes the first place sport on Samba TV.) Overall, though, this show is another hit for HBO right off the back of The Pitt’s elite run.
This is an argument for weekly releases and plus-sized episode orders, since it makes the content spend more efficient. HBO doesn’t put as many shows on the Nielsen charts as Netflix, but they keep their shows on the charts for much longer. That means fewer shows for the same top performance, and honestly, as my strategy column this week implied, I wonder how long Netflix can avoid switching to this.
Quick Notes on TV
- Reading Bloomberg this week, Lucas Shaw reported that no Netflix TV series made the top ten overall charts this week. And…yeah, he’s right. Excellent catch! Here’s my “Nielsen top 30” overall, and indeed, no Netflix-only show makes the top 10 (but one film did).
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What’s driving this? Well, Netflix’s TV shows are now short in terms of average run time per episode and short in terms of total episodes per season. Four weeks back, Netflix released Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen, which only had eight episodes. Last week, Netflix put out Big Mistakes, a half-hour show with only eight episodes, and this week, they rolled out Beef. While the new season is longer than the first season of Beef—which came out wayyyyy back in 2023—at 35-minute long episodes, this one is still only 43-minutes-per-episode long and only has eight episodes. In other words, as Netflix episode orders shrink—remember when 13 episodes were standard?—customers finish the shows faster and hence, the series don’t last as long on the charts. The current season of Beef only had 8.3 million hours according to Nielsen, down from 16.0 million for the first season. Samba TV has similarly bad numbers, only one week on those charts.
- After Beef, very few new releases made the viewership charts I track. Looking at last week’s shows, The Boys had 15 million hours in its second week, so that show is on track to put up huge numbers in its last season. It’s done well on Samba TV too, making it three weeks, though its Luminate numbers are fairly light. Related, Invincible continues to do well on Nielsen, and even showed up on Samba TV and Luminate again. Here’s how The Boys and Invincible compare to each other:
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