(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.)
Wow. There’s a lot to get to this week, since it’s a double issue due to the Thanksgiving holiday. (And I can’t push any material to next issue, since I have to cover eight new scripted shows, two blockbusters, and a boxing match next week.) In fact, there’s so much to chat about that I’ll have a bonus article tomorrow on one TV show flop (which is really just an excuse to talk about merchandising).
We’ve got two TV mini-dives—including a look at three weekly TV shows and Netflix’s dominance with three binge-released returning TV shows—a mini-dive looking at horror films, I barely had time to rant about an overrated movie genre and had to limit myself to two paragraphs, Paramount+’s Lioness big jump from season one, Illumination’s success on Netflix, my look at Nielsen’s The Gauge, the NBA’s ratings slide, all the flops, bombs and misses, and more.
So let’s get right to it!
(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 October 28th to November 10th.)
Television – Three Big Weekly Series Come To An End: We Have a Winner, a Mystery and the Comeback Story of the Year
Several notable weekly TV series came to an end the week of 28-Oct, so we can check in on their full runs. One was a clear hit (season four of Only Murders in the Building on Hulu), one a mystery (the first season of The Penguin on HBO/Max), and one a comeback story (the first season of Agatha All Along season one on Disney+).
Let’s start with Only Murders in the Building. This show hasn’t really grown from its second season, but it’s not shrinking either. Every year, it provides Hulu with a steady set of weekly viewership. That’s a big win, and since it makes the charts for so many weeks in a row, that viewership adds up. Only Murders made the Nielsen top ten for eleven weeks and ended up with 84.1 million total hours. As a half-hour show, that viewership is even more impressive. (Also, this chart shows that The Handmaid’s Tale was a big show for Hulu.)
In contrast, I still don’t know what to think about The Penguin. It had its finale episode on 10-Nov. Some numbers are fantastic, like its incredible run on Samba TV—with the most weeks at number one for any show on Samba’s charts in 2024—but some aren’t, like how it never made the Nielsen charts.
And yet…HBO’s own internal datecdotes don’t tell the story of a massive hit. The show did grow from its premiere—getting to 2.1 million same day viewers for the finale—but that’s well below other top HBO shows. Their execs did say it had “audiences similar to The Last of Us and House of the Dragon” on their earnings call, but the data disagrees with that assessment. Yet the IMDb score is fantastic for this one, with an 8.7 on 130K reviews.
As for Agatha All Along on Disney+, in this case, it had a remarkable turnaround for a Disney+ series. Usually, when interest fades out on a Marvel or Star Wars weekly show, it just disappears, as happened with Ms. Marvel, Secret Invasion or The Acolyte. Not so for Agatha All Along, which peaked at 12.3 million hours in its last week on the charts.
I had a feeling this was coming, since Joe Adalian of Vulture—in a ratings write-up that quoted yours truly—highlighted a Disney datecdote saying it would grab “4.6 million viewers for episode eight and 3.9 million viewers for episode nine — gains of 48 percent and 26 percent, respectively, versus the one-day averages for the premiere.”
The big win for Disney here—with a caveat—is that the show gained steam over time. It likely had word of mouth success, and more fans watched it as the season progressed. That’s a point in favor of the weekly releases. I’m not sure a binge release would have seen the same growth. Peaking over 10 million hours definitely puts this in the “not a miss for Disney” category. (The IMDb is mixed with a 7.2 on 63K reviews.)
The caveat is that the numbers don’t blow me away. While not a miss, I wouldn’t call this one a hit either. It avoided the “miss or flop” labels but didn’t do enough to get to “it’s a hit” status. Looking at the weekly data, it still had as much total viewership as She-Hulk or Secret Invasion, just with a higher peak at the end of its run.
The good news is that Joe Adalian reported that Disney focused on keeping costs in check for this production. That might ultimately be the lesson for all these genre shows: if you have crazy huge production budgets, you need a high hit rate and big ratings. Now that the hit rate for Disney’s Marvel and Star Wars shows has clearly slipped, budgets need to come down.
Television – And Yet…Netflix Keeps Dominating with Big Returning Shows
If you’re a Netflix bull, your response to the success of the shows in the previous section is, “Yeah, but what about Netflix?” On the week of 4-Nov, three big returning Netflix shows took first, second and third place in the Nielsen Top Ten.
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