(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.)
Before we dive into this week’s report, I want to shout out friend-of-the-newsletter Emily Horgan and her team’s latest report on kids content at The Kids Streamersphere. She digs deep into the kids streaming space, leveraging her experience developing kids content along with a great eye for data and finding insights like this chart tracking the fall of Cocomelon and the rise of Paw Patrol on Netflix:
The headline (“The Kids Streaming Landscape Has Never Been More Competitive”) speaks to me, because the battle for kids content looks as fierce as ever.
Read the announcement and get the report here.
(And no, this isn’t sponsored content. Emily is a friend, but more importantly, I genuinely love her work. That said, if you’d like to feature your company’s report in this newsletter, please reach out!)
Before we get to today’s Streaming Ratings Report, I have my eye on a future streaming story: Project Hail Mary. Amazon has their first genuine theatrical hit on their hands! It grossed over $80 million last weekend.
So it’s time for a poll: does this movie set records for Prime Video when it comes to streaming? (Head to Substack to see the results.)
Okay, on to the data. Two big returning shows came back for both Netflix (The Night Agent) and Prime Video (Cross), and we’ll see if they continue the trend of big returning series coming up short. Plus, Hulu is back with a new film in the Predator universe (and Prey was their biggest straight-to-streaming film), Netflix’s best reality competition returns for its tenth season, what the Super Bowl’s giant ratings mean for streaming, The Traitors and The Lincoln Lawyer put up big numbers, all the flops, bombs and misses, and a whole lot more.
(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 February 9th to February 22nd, 2026
You can find a link to my terminology here.)
Sports – The Super Bowl And the “Ceiling” for All TV
This report primarily covers “streaming”, or everything not on traditional TV. So why bring up the Super Bowl today? (It premiered the Sunday before the time period of this report, so I squeezed it into this issue.)
Because it really shows you what the tippity-top of TV viewership could look like.
Specifically, it provides context for how big the biggest streaming show could aspire to be, if that makes sense. Think of it like this: according to Nielsen, about 125 million people watched the Super Bowl this year. Unlike normal football games, it runs long, about 3.5 to 4 hours. Say it’s 3.5 million hours.
That’s over 400 million hours of viewership in one single day.
For context, the biggest streaming season one in my data set is Wednesday and it only has 368.4 million hours over its entire run. Ozark had over 350 million hours back in 2020. The latest season of Stranger Things did best Super Bowl with over 700 million hours, which shows how big that series was. The biggest movie is a race between Encanto and KPop Demon Hunters; Encanto had just over 400 million hours in its first year, while KPop is at 370 million in its first nine or so months. (Normally, I’d include an image, but comparing one time TV viewing to year-long viewing isn’t quite apples-to-apples.)
So…yeah, the Super Bowl and the NFL are huge.
Television – Does the Returning Season Slump Continue?
This week, we have a law enforcement showdown between two returning shows…
Netflix’s The Night Agent versus Prime Video’s Cross.
The Night Agent, about the FBI, came back in one big batch for its third season, while Cross, about a detective/forensic psychologist, came back weekly for its second season.
Netflix’s early 2026 lineup has been genuinely impressive, going from strength to strength to strength, meaning Stranger Things to Bridgerton to The Lincoln Lawyer to The Night Agent in nearly back-to-back weeks. Looking at the rest of the year, I’m genuinely curious if they can maintain the momentum, as I would have spaced these big hit shows out more. And except for Bridgerton, Netflix binge-released these shows.
Did The Night Agent get lost in this big show shuffle? The data is mixed and it seems to be losing some ground. According to Nielsen, the latest season opened to 30.5 million hours, down from a whopping 51.8 million for the second season (that came out last year around this same time).
Samba TV had strong numbers for The Night Agent, though: 4.3 million households watched in the first four days. Any number from Samba TV over 4 million is terrific. It also made their top ten list for two weeks at fourth place. And on Samba TV, it opened to over 40 million hours in one week.
Still, though, this does feel like a softening compared to past seasons. For example, The Night Agent grew its audience by ten million hours when it went from the first season to the second, and now it seems to be sliding the other way, and that usually means a cancellation in season four or five. The cold comfort here is that most of Netflix’s returning shows in 2025 and 2026 saw their viewership slip. We’ve seen this with other recent shows too, like Bridgerton, The Witcher, The Diplomat and Nobody Wants This.
The one exception recently is The Lincoln Lawyer’s fourth season, which had a big jump in its second week, and actually ended up in the forty-million-hour club. That’s a very good hold for this show, and shows the power of the binge release to drive immediate viewership. (Though, yes, I’d still have batch-released this title.)
Prime Video’s Cross, on the other hand, is also down, but it’s slightly tougher to compare this entry with past launches, because this one is coming out weekly, and the first season was binge-released. So it actually makes the most sense to compare it to Fallout:
While two is probably too small a sample size to make a trend, it does seem like these two sophomore season shows (Fallout, then Cross) haven’t done as well as Prime Video’s sophomore shows of a few years ago, when Reacher opened to four weeks over 20 million hours and The Rings of Power had 17 million hours in its first two weeks.
Other data is also disappointing. Samba TV only had Cross making the charts for one week at tenth place, then falling off. Luminate only had two small weeks on the charts at 1.8 and 6.2 million hours.
Listen, this isn’t the end of the road for this show by any means. I was a little disappointed in Fallout, but it crushed it on the weekly charts the last couple of months, and we’ll see if Cross does the same. But if it doesn’t, Amazon lost a potential ongoing hit show.
Still, it does seem like returning shows on streaming have both struggled to bring back their audiences and/or grow them with new fans.
Quick Notes on TV
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