(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 going, let me say:
Go see The Sheep Detectives!
I say this despite having loved Katherine Nero’s argument last month that you shouldn’t guilt people into seeing films. In the case of The Sheep Detectives, I could make the guilt trip case for it. If you’re worried about Hollywood’s embrace of IP, then yeah, rather than see sequels (Devil Wears Prada 2, Mortal Kombat 2) or IP-based films (Michael), go see Sheep Detectives! Similarly, if you want to do your part to help convince Amazon-MGM to keep sending films to theaters, go see Sheep Detectives.
But as that article made the case, you shouldn’t have to guilt people into seeing movies instead. Focus on quality. On this level…go see Sheep Detectives! It’s utterly charming. For all ages. Especially if you’re a parent who wants your kids to see a film that’s decidedly less hyperactive than the Mario films, go see Sheep Detectives. I normally don’t advocate for films in the newsletter, but this one is only going to succeed with great word of mouth; consider this my effort at spreading that.
(This isn’t an ad, but if you would like to advertise in this newsletter, either FYC ads or films, please reach out.)
On to this week’s issue and, man, we’re in the thick of it right now! The Emmy nomination window ends on 31-May, so the streamers put out their biggest, buzziest shows starting around April. (Though this trend hits a screeching halt at the start of May for some reason…I’ll explore that in future issues.)
This week, we had seven (seven!) scripted shows, including the returns of Hacks, Euphoria and The Boys, two shows from Hulu including a reboot and a spinoff, an animated Star Wars show, a new half-hour Netflix show from one of the stars of Schitt’s Creek, a new Elizabeth Banks sci-fi comedy on Peacock, and more. That’s a ton of shows! All that, plus a check-in on the KPop Demon Hunters vs Encanto Nielsen top ten battle, the latest horror film on streaming, The Madison drops off the charts, a quick look at the latest Antenna subscriber data, a fun look at movie run times, 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 April 6th to April 12th, 2026.
You can find a link to my terminology here.)
Television – The Final Season of The Boys Powers Along…
Starting last year, I noticed a lot more TV shows only had eight episodes (or fewer), a trend others have picked up on, too. Pulling up The Boys’ release history today, I realized The Boys might have been an OG eight-episode show, just look:
If this were a broadcast show, after five seasons, we’d be looking at something like 100 or 120 episodes in Amazon’s library. As is, The Boys will finish with forty. That’s not good or bad—fine, maybe slightly bad—but it is a reality that expensive genre shows don’t accumulate as many episodes as their cheaper broadcast cousins did/do.
Another note: looking at The Boys’ release schedule: after its first two seasons, The Boys hopped on that “every other year” release schedule we see for most big budget genre shows. The current fifth and final season started on 8-April, with two episodes and then the rest coming out weekly. As usual, it made the Nielsen charts:
But…it may be down slightly from past seasons.
That said, it’s also clearly one of Amazon’s bigger hits among their shows that have lasted to season four or beyond:
As for other numbers, Samba TV and Luminate both fit the “slightly down” narrative. On Samba TV, the previous season debuted at sixth place, but rose to third. The current outing started at sixth place, but will rise to fourth. So slightly down. We didn’t have Luminate data for previous seasons—Luminate has the data going back to 2022, but it isn’t publicly available—but The Boys’ fifth season opened to under 10 million hours, which again, is weak.
And now for the nuance. Yes, The Boys is “down” to 15.0 million hours for its first two episodes, and the last season opened to 19.9 and 21.5 million hours. But this is still a weekly show that opens to numbers many binge-released shows wish they could get to. It is a sign that The Boys is no longer growing its audience—the gold standard for any TV show—but this doesn’t make the show a miss or even a disappointment. Plus, it’s a weekly show, so it will keep accumulating numbers for weeks to come, and I expect it to hang out on the charts during its final run of episodes.
Quick Notes on TV
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