(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 get started with a jam-packed Streaming Ratings Report, let’s recap the last month or so’s worth of film awards show viewership:
- The Actor Awards, formerly the SAG Awards, missed Netflix’s global viewership charts, meaning it had less than 2.3 or 2.4 million views globally, depending on whether Netflix counted the special as a film or TV show. Either way, that’s very, very low. (As a live program, it’s probably ineligible for the Nielsen or Luminate charts.)
- Over on YouTube, The Film Independent Spirit Awards had a horrible go of it. Just go to their YouTube page. The highest rated video, as of today, has 54K views; many videos have just hundreds of views. I can’t even find one video with the entire show; it’s all clips.
- The Oscars garnered 17.8 million viewers, a decline of 9% in spite of Nielsen’s new Big Data panel.
I’ll discuss the Oscars more in a future article (true, they nominated more popular movies this year, just not enough blockbusters), but the big warning sign is the Spirit Awards. Moving to a social media/YouTube-only distribution system (as many other pundits would suggest that more/many/all media companies should do) did not seem to increase interest in the show. At all.
If I ran a big awards show, I’d probably try to stay on broadcast television (and simulcast the show on a streamer) at risk of moving to a platform like YouTube that can’t push live television effectively. (But who would do that?) And if I’m at Film Independent, I’d abandon this YouTube-only strategy ASAP.
Okay, on to this week’s issue. I’m going to look at Bridgerton’s great opening and Paradise’s strong debut as well, the latest NBC-Universal dino flick to come to streaming, whether Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Drive to Survive and The Gray House make the charts, HBO’s latest dramedy, The Traitors holding strong, all the flops, bombs and misses, and a whole lot more.
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, 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 23rd to March 1st, 2026.
You can find a link to my terminology here.)
Television – Two Big New Shows Try to Avoid Season-Over-Season Drops
One of the challenges facing the streamers, as I’ve written a few times this year, is figuring out how to grow their biggest shows’ audiences season over season. Kasey Moore at Whats-On-NFLX has covered this a bit, but I saw some data from Luminate making the case that many Netflix shows are declining season over season:
That’s the challenge facing returning shows, including two biggies for both Netflix and Hulu, which came out the week of 23-Feb. And both seem to have avoided the dreaded declines.
Let’s start with the monster that is Bridgerton. Its second batch of episodes from its fourth season legitimately surprised me, debuting to 56.2 million hours according to Nielsen. That’s actually six million more hours than the opening batch of episodes for season four. (Perhaps some customers are still catching up on the first batch of episodes, and not all customers binge, especially older customers.) It’s also the 28th highest single week for any TV show since 2021.
But…Bridgerton’s third and also batch-released season performed the same feat, at nearly the same level.
Clearly, Bridgerton is still one of Netflix’s biggest shows in terms of total hours. Here’s how it stacks up to the other Netflix big genre shows:
Overall, I’d still argue, using Nielsen data, that Bridgerton has grown in terms of total hours. At worst, it’s flat, but that’s better than a decline, which we’ve seen with other shows like The Night Agent. On Samba TV, it got to first place in its opening week. So yes, this show is still a hit. But the Luminate data showed a tiny uptick in viewership for the fourth season, only peaking at 13.1 million hours, a number so low I worry they had a data mistake.
A (fairly obvious) solution to the “shows are losing their audiences” problem is to release shows more regularly (which means annually). The sophomore season of Hulu’s Paradise impressed me for two reasons. First, the show came out a year after the last season—a minor miracle these days—and second, it grabbed 15 million hours in its first week, according to Nielsen. That’s a record for the show, showing it grew its audience.
It also stacks up very well to other Hulu second seasons:
Other data backs up the good performance. It also made Samba TV for two weeks, at sixth and tenth place. On Luminate, it got up to 18.3 million hours for just its second season, and then it makes the charts in future weeks.
So I guess it’s all good news for Hulu? Not quite. The show is actually ending with its third season, meaning Hulu will lose two tentpole shows (this and The Bear) over the next year, if not three shows, based on recent news, a topic I’ll write about later this week.
Quick Notes on TV
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