(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.)
You might notice that I’ve been incorporating a few new data sources into the streaming ratings report over the last few weeks, but I haven’t properly introduced them.
Welcome to the Streaming Ratings Report, Reelgood and JustWatch!
As a leading indicator, interest charts are pretty useful at giving a heads up on what shows might be buzzy and thus worth keeping an eye on. Between Reelgood, JustWatch and TV Time, we have a pretty good idea what shows are interesting customers. In my “hierarchy of viewership charts”, I still prefer actual viewership metrics, but these interest charts are still useful, especially for theatrical titles. The interest charts also have a little more variation to them (depending if they include all TV or just streaming), but that provides a good overview of the entire streaming landscape. (Also, all three of these companies can tend to go silent some weeks, so it’s good to have backup data sources.)
I’ll include their Top Ten charts at the bottom of each issue of the streaming ratings report. Again, my goal is to be the most comprehensive, one-stop show for all streaming ratings out there.
On to this week’s issue. Even though it was a light week (not a lot of new titles, especially TV shows) there’s a fair number of juicy topics. We’ve got a battle of two different straight-to-streaming action comedies: Jackpot! versus The Union! Prime Video vs. Netflix! Netflix Halle Berry and Mark Wahlberg vs. John Cena and Awkwafina! Who will win? Bad Monkey debuts on Apple TV+, plus Emily in Paris returns to Netflix, Bel-Air to Peacock, Solar Opposites to Hulu, Industry to HBO/Max, and RuPaul’s Drag Race All-Stars to Paramount+.
See what I mean? That’s a lot of heavy hitters.
All that plus a look at the biggest video games to start the year, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga heads to Max, a big new true crime show, and all the flops, bombs and misses of the week, 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, and 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 August 12th to August 18th.)
Television – Emily in Paris versus Bad Monkey versus Bel-Air
After a few quiet weeks—when most of the streamers avoided taking on the Olympics—this week (the week starting 12-Aug) had a few big new titles from a few different streamers.
Let’s start with Netflix and what looks like a disappointing number at first glance for Emily in Paris. This Lily Collins romance/comedy (but not quite a rom-com) returned with five, half-hour episodes, but on Nielsen, it only got to 13.2 million hours. For a fourth season, that’s not great.
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