(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.)
Has anyone else noticed how weird IMDb’s genres are getting?
Over the last six months or so, my team and I noticed that IMDb’s genres are increasingly wrong (like clear-cut comedies getting marked as dramas) or more interestingly, getting tagged with hyper-specific categories like “Pop Musical” or “Artificial Intelligence” or “Water Sport” or “Body Swap Comedy”. How many body swap comedies are there? I swear I saw an Indian film get tagged as “Sea-Adventure”.
And movies are getting tagged with way, way, way too many genres. What’s the genre for KPop Demon Hunters? Why, it’s a “Computer Animation/Animated Pop Musical Action-Adventure Comedy Fantasy and Music/Musical” How is that useful? I doubt anyone looking up “Action” wants that title to pop up. Black Bag was a Spy Drama Mystery Romance Thriller. Really, that’s a spy thriller, not a “mystery”, possibly with “Romance” as well. And Companion was an “Artificial Intelligence Dark Comedy Sci-fi Psychological Thriller/Thriller”…is it really a comedy and a thriller?
For me, personally, I strictly limit the genres for films and TV shows to just two. My editor/researcher wants to expand to three, but I worry about label creep. The next thing you know, you’re labelling something as a sci-fi action-adventure fantasy dramedy…and that’s not helpful for actual analysis.
All of which is to say…data’s hard! Fitting movies and shows into specific genres might be hardest of all, and automation can’t solve this problem.
Okay, on to this week’s issue. The story, oddly enough, is video-on-demand, with summer blockbusters heading to VOD right away…along with two very surprising new titles. That plus The Chosen finally made a ratings chart (barely), Prime Video might have a weekly hit, Love Island USA continues its hot streak, a lot of library titles make the charts, all the flops, bombs and misses of the week, and more.
But first, I’ll be looking at Netflix’s The Sandman. 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 June 30th to July 6th.)
Television – The Sandman Starts Netflix’ Summer of the Batch with a Nightmare
Like the vague, incomprehensible realm of The Dreaming—the land ruled by Dream of the Endless, the main character of the comic book series that turned into Netflix’s The Sandman TV series—the data for The Sandman on Netflix is confusing, inchoate and subject to interpretation.
On first glance, its viewership looks low, as the number of hours viewed for the current batch of episodes that kicked off season two (six episodes came out on 3-July) is down compared to previous seasons:
The caveat, as I put in the parentheses, is that the first season had ten episodes, and this batch only has six, so yeah, it’s down about 40% in new episodes and 33% in total viewership. In other words, the decline is mostly driven by releasing fewer episodes.
Still…
Getting only 10.2 million hours on a holiday weekend isn’t anything to write home about. And this looks like a devoted audience watched it, not a large fan base, as it missed the Samba TV charts entirely…
That means that in terms of unique households, there weren’t a lot of folks checking it out. (We have Samba TV data through the week of 21-July, and it still never makes it.) On Luminate, the show only peaked at 7.1 million hours, and actually missed the charts the week of 11-July.
So on the one hand, The Sandman kept its audience around, likely, though, the batch release decreased the total number of hours. That said, it never had a huge audience to begin with. Given its $15 million an episode price tag, the online controversy around the creator/showrunner, Neil Gaiman, and the small audience, Netflix has already cancelled this series. I’d add, the three-year gap between seasons likely killed any chance to grow the audience. I’m also puzzled that Netflix scheduled this one for their (usually) very lucrative holiday slot.
The last point I’ll bring up before we move on, though, is that we could call this “Netflix’s Summer of the Batch”. After moving to a lot of full binge-released seasons (The Lincoln Lawyer, Ginny & Georgia, You, The Night Agent, Virgin River and more), Netflix looks to be going all in on the batch release this summer with The Sandman, Wednesday and Stranger Things splitting up their seasons into two batches.
At this point, I don’t think we can say that Netflix has a preference for “binge” or “batch” releases for their returning shows, and they’ll change their mind as they see fit. (But they still almost always binge-release new shows.)
Quick Notes on TV
- According to Luminate and Nielsen, we didn’t have any other originals besides The Sandman make a viewership chart. No seriously! Look at the Nielsen top ten originals list:
- Technically, Prime Video’s Countdown—an original drama that’s being released weekly—would have made the Nielsen top ten in tenth last week, but it got bumped by Trainwreck: Poop Cruise, which Nielsen classifies as an original TV show. But it made it this week. We’ll see how many weeks Countdown stays on the charts, but I like its weekly release schedule. Smart call, Prime Video! Also, I asked Nielsen for data about The Chosen’s fifth season (titled “The Last Supper”) that came exclusively to Prime Video, and it would have been in eleventh place this week with 5.1 million hours. That nugget has some upside (the show seems to have grown over the last couple of weeks), but more downside: 5.1 million hours is tiny.
- Love Island USA continues to do very well for Peacock, though it has daily episodes, which helps boost its totals. For the week of 30-June, it got to 28.3 million hours. The Waterfront on Netflix only lasted three weeks on the Nielsen charts, but had an impressive four-week run on Samba TV. Prime Video’s We Were Liars is on a three-week run on the charts, but has never gotten over 10 million hours.
- Last issue, I wrote that Disney+’s Ironheart would miss the Nielsen charts this week, and that take was straight wrong! It made it with 8.9 million hours in its second week. That’s actually better than I expected, but I still worry that since it dropped all its episodes over two weeks, it will drop off shortly and will end up much lower than the Disney+ Marvel series at their peak:
- Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers ended its second season on 2-July, and it never made the Nielsen or Luminate charts after falling off earlier this summer. It did have a good run on the TV Time interest charts, but as I say often, I care much, much, much more about viewership than interest.
The rest of this article is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so 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 post about the Streaming Ratings Report, why you need it, and why we cover streaming ratings best.
