(Welcome to the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a newsletter on the entertainment industry and business strategy. I write a weekly Streaming Ratings Report and a bi-weekly strategy column, along with occasional deep dives into other topics, like today’s article. Please subscribe.)
Welcome to the penultimate article in my recap of streaming viewership in 2025. Today, I’m handing out superlatives for the film and TV show winners (and losers) for all of 2025, summarizing my last three articles along with the misses articles from this year and the first half of last year. The top film and the top TV show aren’t a surprise, but I think everyone forgets the biggest misses on streaming, especially the TV shows.
Again, this series serves as a permanent record, so to speak, for the biggest hits and biggest disappointments of the year.
But before we get to the winners and losers, let’s look at the biggest TV show story in 2025, which I haven’t mentioned yet in any of my year-end recaps. To do so, I’ll need to make up a new award, my “Question Mark of the Year”…
Let’s dive right in!
The Biggest Question Mark of the Year: Heated Rivalry
Honorable Mention: The Pitt’s 2025 performance
One of the more eccentric writing choices I’ve made was, years ago, dubbing TV shows and films that don’t make any streaming viewership or interest charts a “Dogs Not Barking”. It’s a literary reference to a Sherlock Holmes story (not The Hounds of Baskerville, but the short story “The Adventure of Silver Blaze”) where the master detective deduces that the missing evidence was the dogs not barking when the criminal came by…because they knew him. In this case, Sherlock was able to notice the thing that didn’t happen.
This effect is real. Since we only get top ten lists for streaming viewership (compared to, say, theatrical returns, where we get data on virtually every film, even really small ones, like films in just a handful of theaters), it’s really, really hard to notice/remember the films and TV shows that go unmentioned. This exacerbates the “availability heuristic”, giving streaming somewhat of a PR leg up over traditional distribution.
This year, this happened in a big, big way.
For example, writing up the data last week, I noticed that Only Murders in the Building popped on Antenna’s chart, and I realized that we haven’t mentioned that somewhat-popular (and in past years, very popular) TV show once. Sure enough, it was the fortieth biggest returning show, so not a flop, but also not a top 25 show. So it went unmentioned.
But the biggest example from 2025 is, of course, Heated Rivalry, a TV show that got more news coverage last year than possibly any other TV show, likely surpassing Stranger Things for buzz. I’m talking think pieces and write-ups in virtually every center/center-left magazine, website and podcast.
Did you notice that I didn’t mention this show once in the article in my recap of the top new shows in 2025? Honestly, I forgot about it until I was mostly finished with my write-up. I briefly mentioned Heated Rivalry in my recap of the flops, bombs and misses of the second half of 2025 in a parenthetical about how I wasn’t including it, but that was it.
I stand by that now. This show is still a huge question mark.
I wrote extensively about Heated Rivalry months ago, over 3,000 words detailing all the positives (buzz, datecdotes and ROI) and negatives (not making the viewership charts and some exclusive Nielsen data on the show’s low weekly viewership).
Based on the pushback I received at the time, I’m not really in a rush to write about it again or rehash those arguments.
Which is fine! Time will tell how well Heated Rivalry does. Because next year, new episodes will come out, and they’ll prove how much audience the show really does or doesn’t have.
The worst case scenario is that Heated Rivalry is Heartstopper 2.0. For years, I wrote about how Heartstopper had pretty lackluster streaming viewership, then people would tweet angry things at me, usually explaining that I didn’t get that everyone watched everything on mobile, especially the kids these days.
Then the show ended after just three seasons. And massive hits don’t usually end after such short runs.
Based on the incredibly similar genres (LGBTQ+ romance, though one is sports and the other is YA), I could see the same thing happening to Heated Rivalry, especially if the budget balloons after next season, since talent will demand a whole lot more money for a show *everyone* is saying is a massive hit, ruining the show’s elite ROI.
On the other hand, what’s Heated Rivalry’s best case scenario? As we saw last year, it could become the next The Pitt.
The Pitt’s viewership grew incredibly slowly last year, and I worried that it invalidated my theory that procedurals would work on streaming. Then the show made the Nielsen charts for its last five weeks, showing strong growth. Still, I didn’t know how season two would do. Now we know. As I just wrote, it’s huge, and will pass Landman as the largest second season on streaming of all time.
It’s not too high a bar to say that Heated Rivalry needs to show that same growth. I want to see viewership week one of 15 million hours or more. If it comes in at 7 million or so hours, even that would seem light compared to the headlines. The next season should come out a year from now, so we’ll see!
Streaming Losers of the Year: Television
On to the winners and losers. Let’s start with the TV show losers, since most people either haven’t heard of the shows that flopped or, worse, think that some of these TV show flops were actually hits. I’d bet that I could poll a hundred Americans and maybe ten will be able to name the biggest bomb of the year.
Okay, first up, here are the contenders for “Bomb of the Year” in alphabetical order:
- A Thousand Blows (Hulu)
- The Abandons (Netflix)
- All’s Fair (Hulu)
- Apple Cider Vinegar (Netflix)
- Bel-Air (Peacock)
- Chad Powers (Hulu)
- Chief of War (Apple TV)
- Crutch (Paramount+)
- Death by Lightning (Netflix)
- Doctor Who (Disney+)
- Duster (HBO Max)
- Dying for Sex (Hulu)
- Foundation (Apple TV)
- FUBAR (Netflix)
- The Girlfriend (Prime Video)
- Goosebumps (Disney+)
- Hacks (HBO Max)
- House of Guinness (Netflix)
- Invasion (Apple TV)
- The Kardashians (Hulu)
- Law & Order: Organized Crime (Peacock)
- Loot (Apple TV)
- Mid-Century Modern (Hulu)
- Mo (Netflix)
- The Morning Show (Apple TV)
- Murderbot (Apple TV)
- Nine Perfect Strangers (Netflix)
- Palm Royale (Apple TV)
- The Paper (Peacock)
- Peacemaker (HBO Max)
- Platonic (Apple TV)
- Prehistoric Planet (Apple TV)
- Sandman (Netflix)
- Starting 5 (Netflix)
- Too Much (Netflix)
- Toxic Town (Netflix)
- Twisted Metal (Peacock)
- Upload (Prime Video)
- Washington Black (Hulu)
- The Witcher (Netflix)
- The Z Suite (Tubi)
I will note that a number of notable adult animated shows also missed the charts or underperformed, like Big Mouth, Futurama, Sausage Party: Foodtopia, Hazbin Hotel, Helluva Boss, and Solar Opposites (and those are just the most notable animated shows), but they tend to be cheaper to produce, so didn’t make this final list.
Miss of the Year: Sandman
Honorable Mentions: Goosebumps, Peacemaker, The Witcher, Nine Perfect Strangers, Twisted Metal
When it comes to “misses” I define them as shows that maybe had some viewership, but not enough especially for the budget. And that describes Sandman to a “t”. Sure, this show got some viewership, emphasis on “some”, but not enough to avoid being cancelled. Based on the presumably quite large budget for this genre show, not to mention the quality of the underlying IP—the Sandman graphic novel series was quite literally one of the biggest, most influential graphic novel series of all time; it made The New York Times bestseller list, unheard of at that time—this is a huge miss. Oh, and it was mired in controversy after the graphic novelist/showrunner had a # MeToo scandal.
The Witcher also saw its viewership decline season after season. Reminder: at one point, this show was on the level of Netflix’s biggest TV shows, like Stranger Things, though it premiered right before we started getting weekly viewership numbers from third parties. (Netflix leaked datecdotes at the time about its success.) It was supposed to be the next Game of Thrones. Now each season’s viewership is lower than the last.
(Keep this chart in mind when I talk about Stranger Things later.)
Peacemaker made the Nielsen charts eight weeks after it first came out for 6.6 million hours. For a show set in the DC universe written by James Gunn and starring John Cena, this show should perform better.
I also define “misses” as shows that missed the charts after successful first seasons. Like Goosebumps. This Disney+ show was one of the rare non-MCU, non-Star Wars Disney+ hit shows when it first came out. But the second season came out in January (instead of October, when they should release horror TV shows) and failed to capture the magic of the first season. The same goes for Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers which, after a four-year break, returned and didn’t chart. Or Twisted Metal. Its first season made the charts, albeit at a low level, but the second one didn’t.
Flop of the Year: Chad Powers
Honorable Mentions: Bel-Air, The Paper
Again, the definitions are loose here (really, this is just a chance to highlight the biggest TV show flops and misses of the year) and I’ll define “Flop of the Year” as the show with the greatest provenance/IP/talent attached, but missed the charts.
To me, that was Hulu’s Chad Powers, starring Glen Powell (who I like!) and coming from Omaha Productions. There are a lot of football TV shows in production right now, but I think many people discount the difficulty in translating the interest in live sports into either scripted or unscripted sports material. Outside of Running Point, it’s hard to point to many pro sports scripted shows that are wildly succeeding these days. The genre has a very low hit rate. And for a show with a big name attached, this needed to do better.
Peacock took three big IP swings last year, and all three failed to hit. The Paper, a loose spinoff of The Office, never took off, and Bel-Air bowed out the way it began: without making the charts. And I mentioned Twisted Metal above.
TV Bomb of the Year: Chief of War
Honorable Mention: Duster
The “Bomb of the Year” goes to the most expensive flop of the year, which is, as usual and without a doubt, an Apple TV show. Chief of War reportedly cost $340 million, based on a filing for New Zealand’s tax credits. That’s an insane amount of money for a TV show that I would bet a fractional amount of Americans have even heard of.
No, seriously, if you went out and asked people about Chief of War, how many would be able to name it? Or say what streamer it’s on and who starred in it. And this is all coming from a Jason Momoa-stan.
Why did Duster get mentioned here? Because this was the only TV show that came from JJ Abrams ginormous $500 million production deal. The Ankler recently wrote about how these deals are going away. Results like this are why.
TV Show Winners in 2025
Okay, let’s get to the good news! The winners!
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…
- All the winning TV shows, including best new show, biggest weekly show, unscripted show, and more…
- The daily reality show that provides a new model for the streamers…
- The three-way tie for best new show…
- All the film winners…
- All the streaming film losers…
- 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.
