(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.)
Let me clear up a minor data note before we start.
When I write about Luminate—for example, in my take on Heated Rivalry last week—I often describe the limitations of MY Luminate dataset, emphasis on “my”, meaning the data I control. To be clear, I’ve only collected Luminate’s data since they started publicly publishing US viewership top ten lists at the end of May 2024. Thus, my dataset—again, the dataset I use—only goes back to May 2024, while Luminate has collected (and provides) data going to 2022.
They also collect data for acquired shows (like Heated Rivalry!) and Pay 1 films, but they don’t publish them in Variety. So those categories don’t show up in my dataset (since I am not a paying subscriber!) but Luminate still has that data. (This report only uses publicly available data.)
As a data junky, I am fairly crazed about describing data accurately, and I regret any confusion about my Luminate descriptions. I love using Luminate’s data alongside Samba TV and Nielsen to deepen our understanding of content viewership in the streaming wars, and I hope to add more in the future.
On to this week’s Streaming Ratings Report! This edition technically started with the deep dives into both KPop Demon Hunters and Heated Rivalry last week, and was delayed two days by Friday’s general strike. But that leaves a lot to get to, including a very big disappointment for Netflix, why I feel bad about this week’s “Miss of the Week”, a couple of big weekly swings from Prime Video and Disney+, a buzzy headline that I debunk, the case against cultural stagnation, all the flosps, bombs and misses, and a whole lot more.
But we start with a show that debuted in early November, had a slow burn, then made multiple top ten charts in December.
(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 December 8th to December 21st.
You can find a link to my terminology here.)
Television – Is Apple’s Latest Success a Hit, Hit for Them, or Something Else?
If I told you I’d be writing about a super buzzy, slow-burning hit from November, you’d be forgiven if you thought this was the Heated Rivalry issue.
Instead, I’m talking about the red line on this chart!
That’s right, Pluribus, Apple’s latest self-described smash hit. I say self-described because they put out a datecdote on it. (See below.) Is it a big, big hit?
Like Heated Rivalry, I think we need to distinguish between three categorizations here:
- A “hit” meaning one of the top 15% of TV shows in America.
- A “hit for them”—a term I coined—meaning it’s a hit given the streamer’s (usually smaller) size.
- The show is buzzy. (Which is its own form of popularity.)
For a show like Pluribus, it easily—and yes, easily—is a “hit for Apple TV (formerly +)” because Apple TV just doesn’t have many hit shows. First, here’s all the season 1 Apple TV shows that have ever made the Nielsen top ten:
Yep, it’s a success for Apple TV, and continues a mini-trend for them, which is having a show make the charts very, very late in life, showing up on Nielsen in its seventh week. Here’s a list of all the other TV shows that accomplished this…there aren’t that many! (I also added Heated Rivalry since it grew its audience over time.)
There’s more good news: Pluribus made the Samba TV charts (for three weeks) in December and made Luminate for two more weeks in December as well (though on the low end at 4.7 and 6.1M). It also has elite IMDb scores: an 8.0 on 116K reviews. Apple TV also called it their “most viewed drama of all time”, meaning it’s still behind Ted Lasso among all shows, but ahead of Severance. (At least, according to that cherry-picked datecdote.)
So again, at least it’s a hit for Apple. Is it just a “hit” period? Well, I mean, look at these charts and try to tell me it is:
Being blunt—and this applies to a certain other show too—Landman gets more viewership in one week than most of these shows will have in their first 90 days.
Right now, the biggest shows on Apple have a ceiling due to that service’s small size. Notably, Ted Lasso shattered that ceiling and was a hit anyways, but we haven’t seen any other shows perform to its extraordinary level. I do think Pluribus could have a strong second season, like Severance. The worry, of course, is that it’s very pricey, like everything else on Apple TV. These budgets and small viewership only work for Apple because they can deficit finance their streamer and traditional studios cannot.
This does leave that last category, popularity. And yeah, like Heated Rivalry, Pluribus got a lot of news coverage that likely outpaced its viewership. That’s not a bad thing, and for a streamer, it is, in fact, a great thing. But for business leaders and decision makers, it can be confusing, and that’s why I’m here: to cut through the media noise with data signals.
Quick Notes on TV
- Emily in Paris’ fifth season came out on 18-Dec and…it did fine. While the totals are about the same—13.9 million hours, whereas the first batch opened to 13.2 million last time—this season was binge-released and season four came out in two batches. It made the Samba TV top ten charts for three weeks, at third, fourth and seventh. On Luminate, it had 19.2 million hours in its first full week, which is good, though a bit shy from great, considering this show’s longevity.
- Percy Jackson and the Olympians came to Disney+ for its second season on 10-Dec and Fallout came to Prime Video for its second season on 16-Dec. Both shows were hits last time they came out (heck, Fallout was insanely successful) so it will be interesting to see how they do, as both came out weekly in December. As such, I plan to check in next week.
- Netflix put out the Canadian drama Ripple on 3-Dec; though it’s from Lionsgate, it still qualified as an original, according to Nielsen. (Netflix no longer brands all its shows as originals, even if they are first run exclusive shows.) It did poorly, only getting 5.9 million hours according to Nielsen.
- Really, the story from November to December may just be the insane viewership of Stranger Things’ final season, which eclipsed 50 million hours again, then dropped to “just” 30 million hours.
- Paramount+ continues to do very well on the Samba TV charts, with Landman absolutely crushing it, but also Mayor of Kingstown making the charts for all of December. Landman also remains huge on the Nielsen charts.
- As for other shows, Absentia, a Prime Video show that’s now on Netflix, fell off after three weeks. Sean Combs: The Reckoning continues to do extremely well for a docu-series, and The Beast in Me has had a very long run for Netflix, too. Conversely, Netflix’s Western, The Abandons, fell off the charts after two weeks, well below “The Obliterated Line”, and it’s already been cancelled.
- As for Thursday Night Football, a weak outing featuring the Atlanta Falcons and Tampa Bay Buccaneers led to the worst ratings nights of the season, but it rebounded the next week in a West coast match up of the Seattle Seahawks and the Los Angeles Rams.
- Over on the Acquired chart, Homeland continued its run after arriving on Netflix, making it to four weeks on the charts. The West Wing also came to Netflix, but we haven’t seen it chart yet. The AMC series Moonhaven also landed on Netflix, but it only made some interest charts. Lastly, the Hulu original Castle Rock—from 2018—arrived on Netflix, and it made the Originals charts.
- There actually weren’t all that many notable outright misses over this two-week period. For the week of 8-Dec, I’d give the “Miss of the Week” win/loss to Netflix’s Simon Cowell: The Next Act. I don’t hold unscripted TV shows to the same standards as scripted misses, but the fact that this show stars Simon Cowell feels notable. That said, it’s not the biggest miss in the world.
- As for other misses the week of 8-Dec, Disney+’s behind-the-scenes doc, Taylor Swift: The End of an Era, didn’t chart during this time period, but it shows up on the charts in future weeks at 6.3 million hours, just enough to save it from being a miss, but just barely. Same goes for Netflix and Mr. Bean’s four-episode comedy, Man vs. Baby, which got 5.4 million hours one week on Luminate. The “Dogs Not Barking” (my term for any show or film that doesn’t make any of the ratings charts that I track, find an explainer here) include Paramount+’s UK-acquisition, Little Disasters, the second season of Hulu’s Dance Moms: A New Era, Netflix’s already-cancelled Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft, and Peacock’s Here Come the Irish.
- For the week of 15-Dec, nothing felt notable enough to merit a “Miss of the Week” win. We had four DNBs, including Tubi’s Mo’ Waffles, which looks low budget, Netflix’s latest game show starring Neil Patrick Harris, What’s in the Box? Apple TV+’s nature docu-series Born to Be Wild (which my researcher/editor’s daughter loved), and the sixth season of Netflix’s My Next Guest Needs No Introduction With David Letterman.
- I normally don’t mention kids shows, but these shows felt notable: Disney+’s Star Wars: Young Jedi Adventures, Paramount+’s Dora, Netflix’s Creature Cases, and Paramount+’s Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles didn’t make it over these two weeks.
- Finally, I counted ten foreign-language TV shows that missed the charts, including notable titles like Mexico’s The Accident, Japan’s Record of Ragnarok, Spain’s City of Shadows and more. I don’t share the foreign-language flops every week, but if you read articles arguing that all content is global now, keep this caveat in mind. (I might write more about this topic later this month.)
- I can confirm last week’s misses, most notably Peacock’s Bel-Air and Apple TV’s Prehistoric Planet.
Film – Netflix’s $450 Million Disappointment?
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 Netflix’s Wake Up Dead Man performed well on streaming…
- …the latest stand up special to make the charts…
- …the domination of Christmas films…
- …debunking another case of data amnesia…
- …debunking the Video Game Awards datecdote…
- …a “miss of the week” that still deserves props…
- And a lot more…
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