(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.)
I feel validated.
Just this week, Disney dropped Doctor Who, ending their co-production deal with the BBC. Who could have seen this coming? You, the readers of this report, since I’ve been writing about this show’s sagging ratings for years now.
But what made me really happy was that other media outlets cited my work, including, wait for it now, Deadline! They linked to me. Finally! Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal, but I believe this is literally the first time that a Penske-Media-owned industry trade website (Variety, Deadline or THR) has linked to my work. (I’ve been told before that they don’t link to anonymous writers.) I also got a link in TIME magazine’s profile of Stranger Things, which is equally crazy.
So huge yay!
In more “I called it!” news, check out this great article in The Ankler on the cooling sports docu-series market. I’ve been warning about this as a potential bubble for a while now, and now the industry is seeing what I saw in the data.
All of which is to say, if you want to know why you should be reading (and subscribed to) this report, that’s why: to stay ahead of the curve. Most other news outlets rely on press releases and insider access, telling you what studios would like you to know; you need to know what the data actually says to stay ahead of everyone else.
Lest I go full Nikki-Finke-esque “Toldja!” mode, let’s get right to this week’s double issue. My team and I had a pre-planned vacation last week, and we had hoped to get an SRR out, but it didn’t happen. Alas, we should be all caught up by this week. As for this issue, there’s a lot to discuss, including quite a few theatrical hits (and misses) arriving on streaming, the fate of a few weekly shows on the charts, how Hollywood helps video games, a rare FX show to make the ratings charts, a notable spy show flopping again, toy sales, and a whole lot more.
But we’ll start with a stream of new shows in September on streaming. The “fall season” isn’t just for broadcast!
(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 September 15th to September 28th.
You can find a link to my terminology here.)
Television – The Streamers Are Acting Like Broadcasters
One of the reasons I gave this issue the headline I did is because a lot of shows came back right in the middle of September…just like broadcast shows of old. The Morning Show returned after its typical two-year break to Apple TV+, Gen V came back to Prime Video after a two-year break as well, and Tulsa King returned to Paramount+ after only a one-year break. Netflix also put out three more scripted shows, and this pace of big releases continues for the whole month of September.
Let’s start with that last show, since I want to give Paramount+ credit for putting its shows out annually. It’s a smart strategy because…it’s so obvious. Yes, TV shows benefit from smaller gaps between seasons, and Paramount+ is almost unique amongst streamers in successfully executing that strategy.
As for Tulsa King, it did fine. It premieres on a Saturday, so it usually doesn’t chart during its initial week of release, but it had 7.5 million hours on Nielsen and 4.5 and 5.9 million hours on Luminate in week two. For a weekly-released series, those are solid numbers. Samba TV put this as the number two overall show by unique viewers and noted that Tulsa King had 510K households watch in the first two days, which is a good number.
Moving on, do I owe an apology to Apple TV+’s The Morning Show? For its first few seasons, it really struggled to move the needle on streaming, but later seasons have made the charts. Unlike Tulsa King, though, its seasons come out like clockwork…two years apart.
The latest season made the Nielsen charts, though not great, with just 7.6 million hours on Nielsen in its second week. Again, those are good numbers, especially for Apple TV+, but the previous outing made it for six weeks, and we’ll see if this season pops back on the charts. It also just has utterly elite IMDb scores: an 8.1 on 142K votes. For a workplace drama, those are Bridgerton-esque numbers. The other numbers so far are meh, as it missed the Luminate charts and only 400K households in the first five days, according to Samba TV (and it missed those top ten charts). Overall, this show is held back by both its streamer (Apple TV+ is still small) and the gap between seasons.
As I’ve written about before, Prime Video has struggled with spinoffs of its big, genre TV series, noting that Terminal List: Dark Wolf didn’t break 10 million hours on Nielsen. Gen V—as a reminder, a spinoff of The Boys—struggled in its first season, and its sophomore outing only did about the same, with only 7.1 million hours according to Nielsen, about a million above the first season and about the same as Dark Wolf. It also has basically similar numbers to The Morning Show on Samba TV (430K households in the first five days), and for the much bigger Prime Video, that’s not great.
For all of these weekly-released shows (Gen V, Tulsa King and The Morning Show), though, this is just the start. The key question is how many weeks they make the charts, as that’s what determines “hit or not” status for these shows. Also, the fact that The Morning Show and Gen V have already fallen off the charts isn’t a great sign for either show.
Netflix didn’t have any weekly released returning shows of note during the two-week period of this report, but they did have some splashy new original shows including Black Rabbit (starring Jason Bateman and Jude Law in an eight-episode thriller), Wayward (an eight-episode British thriller starring Toni Collette), and House of Guinness (a historical drama, like Succession in an Irish beer factory).
I’d evaluate those three Netflix shows as “great” (Black Rabbit), “good” (Wayward) and “meh” (House of Guinness) overall. Black Rabbit broke 20 million hours two weeks in a row, which is strong, and it topped the Samba TV charts. Wayward has soft IMDb scores, which probably explains only getting 14.1 million hours in its debut. Samba TV’s datecdotes match, as Wayward had about half the number of households watching it (1.1 million) as Black Rabbit (2.0 million). Meanwhile, House of Guinness debuted below 10 million hours on Nielsen, which is low.
Overall, these two weeks speak to me of how, in the midst of streaming disruption, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Yeah, streamers can release shows whenever they want all year long…but many of them save their biggest swings for September, just like the broadcast season of yesteryear (which was the 2010s).
Quick Notes on TV
We’re just getting started with this issue, but the rest is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so if you’d like to find out…
- …whether Superman soared on streaming…
- …whether a box office flop and box office “eh” did on streaming
- …why video games need Hollywood…
- …what FX shows popped on the charts…
- …whether KPop bested Encanto…
- all the flops, bombs and misses for the week, including a prominent spy show…
- And a lot more…
…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 article about the Streaming Ratings Report, why it matters, why you need it, and why we cover streaming ratings best.
