(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.)
As television shifts to streaming, the TV release calendar is taking on a new rhythm. Back in the day—think most of the 20th century—new TV shows premiered in the fall, the season schedule stayed mostly the same all year, with a few cancellations, and big events happened every few months (anchored around the “sweeps”), then new shows mostly died out during the summer. As time went on, “mid-season replacements” also became more of a thing, but for the most part, this was the rhythm of the television in America.
The streaming calendar has its own, more subtle rhythms. While new shows keep coming out all year, the “new sweeps” happen during the holidays; the streamers, especially Netflix, save their biggest films and TV shows for November (Thanksgiving), which always feature some of the largest weeks of the year in terms of new shows and films. 14-Nov-2022 had the most new titles I’ve ever tracked (56), and 18-Nov-2024 had the third most (46). While the week of Christmas features fewer titles, it tends to have some of the biggest hits so streamers save some big titles for then too.
But don’t discount Emmy season!
What’s Emmy season? The Emmy nominations season usually ends on 31-May (as it does this year), meaning that if you want a TV show to be eligible for an Emmy, it has to come out before then. And if your show comes out in June or July, your chances of being remembered by voters drop dramatically, so the streamers (especially Apple TV+ and Hulu) target their buzziest, most critically acclaimed shows for April and May to stay fresh in voters’ minds.
Inevitably, a bunch of these shows flop, since they’re designed to appeal to Emmy voters and critics, not necessarily, you know, audiences. That’s the theme of this week: a lot of pretty buzzy shows that missed the viewership charts. (Next week is even crazier; see the coming soon section at the end.) All that, plus another procedural misfires, Paramount+’s latest crime drama, Amazon’s longest-running cop show, the NCAA tournament ratings, UFC’s down ratings, some great stats on video game consoles, and more.
Today’s edition of the Streaming Ratings Report is free to all, something I do about twice a year, so my free subscribers can get a sense of all of the material (and there’s a lot!) that lives behind my paywall each week.
Since it’s free, go ahead and share this issue far and wide…But I have a warning for you! Next week, I’m starting something new: a password-sharing crackdown. À la Netflix, Disney and others, I’m going to “crack down” (but gently) on (and handful of) people who share these articles week after week to dozens (or hundreds) of people. It’s not fair to my paid subscribers to let some people send it out for free.
Okay, with all that out of the way, 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 March 24th to April 6th.)
Television – A Whole Bunch of Shows Fight for “Miss of the Week”
In one week, a ton of buzzy shows came out, but a bunch missed the charts, so I’m dedicating our “mini-dive” to that topic. And you might fairly ask, “Where are all the visuals?” Well, when a show misses the charts, it’s almost impossible to make a graph of it! You can’t visualize nothing after all.
Let’s start with the biggest swings…
Emmy Shows
Like I just wrote, it’s Emmy season. The problem is that a lot of Emmy-type shows tend not to resonate outside of a specific subset of Americans.
Take, for example, The Studio, Apple TV+’s very buzzy new show from Seth Rogen about the film industry. Is this an Emmy-type show? I mean, of course it is; it’s about Hollywood and Hollywood loves TV shows about Hollywood. Sure enough, almost every entertainment industry-related podcast has been talking about it, and the critical acclaim has come flooding in: it boasts an 81 on Metacritic and an 8.0 on 11K reviews on IMDb. Plus, it made all three interest charts.
But the interest and critical acclaim haven’t translated into ratings. So far, it’s missed all of the ratings charts I track, including Nielsen, Luminate and Samba TV. On the one hand, this is a half-hour, weekly show. With a runtime that short on a tiny streamer, I get why it didn’t make Luminate or Nielsen, but it also missed Samba TV, which measures households, so that short runtime wouldn’t make an impact that.
How big of a miss this is depends on the budget, and only Apple knows that. But even though you and the people you know are talking about it, people aren’t watching it nationally.
Next up, it wouldn’t be Emmy season without a buzzy FX show starring a great actress. In 2023, it was a show starring Kathryn Hahn, and I totally remember the title of that show, as I’m sure you do. Last year, it was The Veil, a spy thriller from Steven Knight starring Elisabeth Moss. This year, it’s Dying for Sex, starring Michelle Williams as a cancer patient who leaves her husband to search for an orgasm.
Unlike The Studio, this was binge-released. Like The Studio, it missed all of the ratings charts I track, aside from some interest charts for a very short amount of time. Like A24, FX gets a ton of buzz and good PR for their critically acclaimed shows, but the ratings never seem to live up to that hype. I definitely think this content focus best explains Hulu’s struggle to grow its viewership share over the last few years in the streaming wars, despite a lot of Emmy wins.
YouTube Stars
I wouldn’t blame you if, reading last week’s Streaming Ratings Report, you said to yourself, “Sure, The Sideman have 22.3 million subscribers on YouTube, but they’re British; I’m not surprised their Netflix show, Inside, didn’t do well in America.” (I labeled it a “miss of the week”, albeit in a light week.)
But this week, I struggle to make the same case with Logan and Jake Paul, whose new Max show, Paul American, missed every ratings chart I track, despite having a combined 40 million plus YouTube subscribers. We saw the same thing when Hulu’s The D’Amelio Show flopped in 2021/2022/2023; she literally had the most TikTok subscribers in the world, but couldn’t convert them into viewers.
(As for IMDb, Paul American only has a 2.0 on 1.2K reviews, which reflects a down-voting campaign, a lack of voting for reality shows, and a genuine lack of viewership.)
Should Hollywood court YouTube stars? Probably, but at the right price. And knowing the Paul brothers, I doubt that their TV rights came at the right price.
Regardless, non-kids streaming shows starring the mega-stars on YouTube aren’t doing huge streaming ratings. There are two possibilities…
- YouTube metrics (which other outlets incredulously cite) are inflated.
- Their metrics are real, but they can’t get their fans to watch on other platforms.
I lean toward the first option—many YouTube stars are also struggling to sell commercial goods—but either way, I wouldn’t pay big bucks to YouTube stars.
Comedies
Next up, Hulu’s latest attempt at a sitcom, Mid-Century Modern. This sitcom, about three older gay best friends living together in Palm Springs, was binge-released and didn’t make the charts, aside from the interest charts. Two notes: this one comes from Ryan Murphy, and I believe that it’s his first miss under his new production deal with Disney. Second, sitcoms remain on a streaming losing streak, my losing genre for 2024.
The second season of Netflix’s Survival of the Thickest missed every chart I track, including interest charts. I don’t think that this cost all that much, but I’m also surprised that it even made it to a second season.
Finally, Apple TV+ released a spinoff series from Mythic Quest, the cleverly-named Side Quest, a four-episode anthology series with fewer than a 1,000 reviews. Related, Apple just cancelled Mythic Quest.
What gets the win/loss for “Miss of the Week”? Honestly, take your pick between The Studio, Dying for Sex, Paul American or Mid-Century Modern.
Quick Notes on TV
- Listen: long time readers know I think the streamers need more procedurals. Or lacking that, just TV shows set in a hospital, police station or courtroom. In 2025, the streamers heeded my advice and Max released The Pitt, Prime Video released On Call, and the week of 31-Mar, Netflix released Pulse, a medical drama with a romance subplot. I’m sold! That’s what I was asking for. And yet…Netflix’s Pulse only debuted to 13.3 million hours in its first week on Nielsen, and only got up to sixth place on Samba TV. On IMDb, it only has a 6.4 on 6K reviews. Since it’s a ten-episode, binge-released series, those aren’t great numbers! The Pitt (see below) is a slow-growing “hit for Max”, and On Call looks to be a miss. So…at best, these shows are batting one for three, with one “hit for Max”, one miss, and one “maybe” for Pulse. That’s not a great hit rate, and it’ll be worth checking in on this genre later.
- I’ll do a deeper dive into a few weekly-released shows soon, but speaking of procedurals, Max’s The Pitt has made the Nielsen charts for three weeks in a row, with weeks of 7.8 to 8.6 to 9.8 million hours. That’s a good rebound—indeed, we’ve never seen that type of run this late into a season one premiere—but again, I’m pretty hesitant to call it a hit at those numbers. Since it is weekly and Max is just a much smaller service than Netflix, Disney+ and Prime Video, it’s a “hit for Max” and the growth is a positive sign for the show. HBO has already committed to 15 more episodes, so we’ll see if it keeps growing. (I’d add, HBO gave us a global datecdote, and I want to put that in context in that future article on weekly shows.)
- Nothing really slows down Netflix. Along with Pulse, Netflix also released Caught, an Argentinian show based on a Harlan Corben novel (it has 6.8 million hours on Nielsen and up to 8.1 million on Luminate), Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer (13.1 million hours on Nielsen and 8.4 and 8.9 million hours on Luminate) and Love on The Spectrum U.S. (14.0 million hours and 12.4 million hours on Luminate) over the weeks of 24-Mar and 31-Mar. Oh, and the South Korean weekly show When Life Gives You Tangerines made Nielsen in its fourth week with 6.4 million hours. Despite what I just said about procedurals, the boom in true crime (look at those Gone Girls numbers) shows that, yeah, the audience loves mysteries/unsolved crimes.
- Over on Prime Video, Bosch: Legacy had streamed on Amazon Freevee, but now that they dissolved that streamer, it’s on “Prime Video” but still free to watch. It made the charts in its second week with 7.8 million hours, giving it the unique milestone of being the first Freevee-to-Prime-Video show to make the Nielsen charts. It’s also coming out weekly, which makes those numbers pretty impressive. The Bondsman also came out on Prime Video on 3-Apr, and it stars Kevin Bacon as a bail bondsman…for the Devil. It premiered to 9.4 million hours. For a binge release that’s not great, but it’s only a half-hour show, so taken together, that’s fine to below average.
- A few shows only made the Luminate charts, but only Luminate. Paramount+’s latest crime show, Mobland, is a ten-episode weekly show, and it’s made Luminate for four weeks at over 10 million hours, which is a good run, though it didn’t make Nielsen. It has great IMDb scores too, an 8.3 on 13K reviews. Paramount has continued to release these dramas weekly on Sundays, a strategy I think works for them and counts as a perfect example of “Don’t just copy Netflix”. (In Paramount+ datecdote news, they claimed 8.8 million viewers watched in the first seven days.) Netflix’s Million Dollar Secret (which sounds awfully a lot like The Traitors) made Luminate with 5.4 and 5.5 million hours, so it just barely escapes me labeling it a miss.
- Reacher got over 20 million hours the week of 24-March, so that show is showing its longevity for Amazon like it has in past seasons as its episodes come out weekly. Meanwhile, The Wheel of Time fell off the Nielsen charts after three weeks. Now, it could easily show back up, but that’s still a disappointing performance for Prime Video.
- Love Is Blind’s eighth season ended up making the charts for five weeks, and that’s fine. Last year’s spring season of this show did way better in the ratings, but this season is beating last fall’s season. This is still clearly Netflix’s best-performing reality show.
- 1923’s final episode streamed on 6-April, the very end of this time period, and it bumped up to 17.7 million hours. It will likely make the charts again next week with delayed viewing. Adolescence made it to four weeks, though it’s down to 9.5 million hours. The Residence is on an aggressive “binge release curve”, dropping to 18.3 million hours in its third week, down from 30.7 million. Meanwhile, Severance finally fell off the Nielsen charts after an eleven-week run.
- Like Reacher and 1923, The White Lotus also released its finale on 6-April, which bumped that show up to 21.8 million hours, making it the biggest show on the streaming charts this week!
- Disney+’s Daredevil: Born Again is crushing the TV Time charts…but not much else. It never made Nielsen and fell off Luminate after a four-week, mediocre run.
- I went over a bunch of misses up above, for the week of 24-Mar, we had a bunch of “Dog Not Barking” of the week (my term for any show or film that doesn’t make any of the ratings charts that we track, find an explainer here), including the third season of Big Boys, a UK-import on Hulu, Apple TV+’s Number One on the Call Sheet and their latest sports docu-series, Fight for the Glory: 2024 World Series, Netflix’s History Channel-type show, Gold & Greed: The Hunt for Fenn’s Treasure, and Paramount+’s Family Legacy. For the week of 31-Mar, Netflix’s latest US-based anime show, based on the video game Devil May Cry, missed the charts, along with the second season of Prime Video’s reality competition show, America’s Test Kitchen: The Next Generation.
Film – Is Sofia Carson a Movie Star?
Last month, after the Netflix global charts came out, I saw some newsletters dub Sofia Carson a movie star, or at least a “Netflix movie star”, which is a fun new category. I only know her because the Disney Channel original movie, Descendants, has been on at my house, let’s say, non-stop. Then my daughter got two different cousins into it.
But in America, it’s hard to make the case that Carson is a “butts in seats” star to borrow Scott Mendelson’s oft-used phrase. Netflix’s The Life List, starring Sofia Carson, opened with 12.9 and 12.7 million hours, which puts this film in the realm of other Netflix romance films like The Wrong Missy, Purple Hearts or Mother of the Bride, or acquired titles like Anyone But You.
It only lasted two weeks on the Samba TV charts. Samba TV had it at 1.5 million households in the first three days, which again is a solid-but-spectacular outing.
Post-Sinners, there’s been a lot of debate over what films/genres/movie stars play overseas and which ones play just in America. With Sofia Carson, it’s sort of the opposite problem. She plays overseas in Netflix films (possibly boosted by the algorithm post-Purple Hearts), but if I were a studio casting a film and her agent demanded a giant payday for her services, I’m not quite there yet.
Quick Notes on Film
- Honestly? I’m a bit underwhelmed by Mufasa: The Lion King, Disney’s latest blockbuster film to make its way to streaming. That film crept up to a very, very impressive $720 million globally, after a slow start. Yet on streaming, it missed the Nielsen in its opening weekend, and only made it to 9 million hours in its second week on Disney. On Samba TV, it only made the charts for one week in 9th place.
- A more impressive outing, though at a similar number to Mufasa, was One of Them Days, the SZA/Keke Palmer comedy that, while only grossing $51 million globally, opened to 10.0 million hours on Netflix. It also got up to 5th place on Samba TV. And this is without the benefit of Netflix’s ad-tier.
- Wicked made it to three weeks on the Nielsen charts and had a third strong week for Peacock.
- We had a host of library titles make either the viewership or interest charts over these two weeks including Sicario: Day of the Soldado (from 2018), Alpha (from 2018), and Geostorm (from 2017) Meanwhile, a slew of Val Kilmer films made the interest charts after that beloved actor’s passing, including Tombstone, Top Secret! Heat and The Saint, but not Batman: Forever, my favorite film of his (from when I was a kid going to the movies constantly in the 90s).
- For the week of 24-Mar, I’m handing out two film losers. First off, Prime Video’s Holland, a thriller starring Nicole Kidman, gets the nod. Amazon might be “committing to theaters” in the coming years, and with this film, you see why. It made the Luminate charts at a lowly 4.4 then 1.4 million hours, which is not great. Samba TV had it at 462K households in four days. Even worse, this movie boasts an abysmal 5.0 on 12K reviews on IMDb. Yikes! Amazon MGM has been scooping up film projects left and right lately, but, as this film shows, the key isn’t to focus on the names/volume, but the actual top tier films that resonate with customers.
- Right there in flopsville is another straight-to-streaming miss, Disney+’s Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Road Trip, starring Eva Longoria. Disney’s 2014 film cost $28 million and made $100 million. This one grabbed 1.8 and 0.9 million hours according to Luminate. With so much data out there that Latino audiences love going to the movies, I don’t get why this film didn’t go to theaters. It couldn’t have done One of them Days-type numbers? Maybe? Of course, it does have 5.1 ratings on 1.1K reviews on IMDb.
- Other films that made the Luminate charts include Netflix’s latest true crime doc, Con Mum. (Excellent title!) at 2.7 million hours, which is fine. Tubi had two films chart over this two-week period: Ex Door Neighbor at 1.4 million and Play Dirty at 2.7 million. Netflix had two foreign-language films, Promised Hearts from Indonesia at 1.1 million and Test from India at 1.0 million.
- And thus the only real DNB for the week was Netflix’s Chelsea Handler: The Feeling. I can confirm last week’s misses, mainly Hulu’s O’Dessa and Netflix’s Bert Kreischer: Lucky.
Anecdata of the Week – Game DiscoverCo on Console Discoverability
Simon Carless recently did some excellent work showing that, on the major consoles, the majority of users spend most of their time playing a handful of games:
On PlayStation, ten games account for over 50% of daily active users. It’s a bit better on Xbox, but not by much: 25 games account for over 50% of DAUs. As you see, on Steam, it takes 50 games, but even then, their top 100 games just make up 59% of DAUs. As always, these distribution rules entertainment.
Steam is a much better platform for new game discovery. Read the whole thing for all the details.
Sports Ratings of the Week Part I – The NCAA Tourney Puts Up Big Numbers
The NCAA tourney is huge. Or should I say “tourneys”, since the NCAA Women’s tournament put up respectable numbers for the third straight year as well.
For the men…
- The NCAA selection show grabbed 5.7 million viewers on average.
- The first weekend averaged (averaged!) 9.4 million viewers.
- The Sweet Sixteen averaged 9.6 million, including a few blowouts.
- The Elite Eight averaged 9.0 million.
- The Final Four averaged 15.5 million viewers, up 21% from the year before.
- The Championship game averaged 18.1 million on CBS. Samba TV pegged it at 11.8 million households.
Add it all up, and we’re talking hundreds of millions of hours of viewership.
For the women…
- The selection show averaged 1.7 million viewers.
- The first week’s games averaged 620K.
- The Elite Eight averaged 2.9 million, the second highest ever, but down from 6.2 million last year.
- The Final Four averaged 3.9 million, third best all time, though again down year-over-year.
- The Championship game averaged 8.6 million viewers, down 54% from the year before.
These rights are locked up until 2032, and the women’s tournament may look like an absolute steal for ESPN by then.
Sports Ratings of the Week Part II -UFC PPV Numbers Are Way Down
The NY Post published a fun report on ESPN and UFC’s relationship, with the big reveal that their pay-per-view numbers are way down since they made a deal with ESPN. (Hat tip to The MMA Draw for finding this tidbit for me. He has a great write up, so check it out.)
UFC apparently really, really wants to go to Netflix, and they want $1 billion per year, but Netflix doesn’t want to host pay-per-views on its platform. I can’t wait to see what happens.
Coming Soon!
Next issue, the Emmy season rush continues, with a ton of shows to talk about like Max’s Hacks and HBO’s The Last of Us, the final season of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Netflix’s Black Mirror, Apple TV’s Your Friends & Neighbors, Disney+’s Doctor Who, and another straight-to-streaming Prime Video film. G20, a Viola David action film, and a YouTube show, Pop the Balloon Live!
Later this month, Andor returns to Disney+, Amy Sherman-Palladino has a new Prime Video dramedy about dance, Etoile, and the fifth season of You returns to Netflix. Plus, Havoc looks to be the next big Netflix action film.
Long term, Prime Video is making a Pacific Rim TV show, so I guess that, post-Citadel/Rings of Power, they’re not trying to keep budgets in check?
Appendix
24-Mar-2025
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31-Mar-2025
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