(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.)
Inspired by the debate over what caused Netflix’s Q2 struggles, I remembered a point about binge releases that I haven’t hit for a while:
While customers think they don’t have to wait to watch a show if it’s binge-released, they’re actually waiting longer.
Back in the day in the broadcast era, weekly-released shows filmed an episode, then released it a few weeks later, while filming new episodes at a weekly cadence. But if a show is binge-released, every episode has to be 100% finished before it can go out to the wider world. That means customers are waiting for months and months, not weeks, for new episodes, but they just don’t know it.
Anyway, on to this week’s issue, where I look at a famous actor (who I really like!) and ask, should he stop making films for streaming? And I take a look at three big returning shows: Avatar: The Last Airbender, the final season of The Bear, and House of the Dragon. All that, plus Avatar: Fire and Ash disappoints on Disney+, The Sheep Detectives try to solve Prime Video’s movie problems, I Will Find You enters rarified territory, Dutton Ranch, Criminal Minds and The Agency give Paramount+ a boost, some excellent stats from Samba TV on the top streamers, BTS’s big concert tour (and how their users manipulate online stats), the biggest MLB game in years, 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, JustWatch and Reelgood interest 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 June 22nd to June 28th 2026.
You can find a link to my terminology here.)
Television – New Seasons Lose Viewership Everywhere…
Well, the topic of the day in streaming ratings is still the decline of sophomore seasons for Netflix, but as I’ve tried to clarify, it’s not just second seasons. Netflix also had trouble launching first seasons.
But it’s also not just first or second seasons! It’s third and fourth seasons as well!
After taking a quick look at the streaming top ten according to Nielsen this week, we can see this is a problem for both HBO Max and Hulu as well:
Yeah, if that number looks low for The Bear, it should. It’s down season-over-season. House of the Dragon is just slightly down. But see that second season for Avatar: The Last Airbender on Netflix?
It’s wayyyyyyyy down.
So that’s the topic of the week: the struggle to hold audiences across three hit shows. And yes, these shows were all “hits” when they came out, meaning they performed well enough to land in the top 15% of TV shows. And they’ve failed to grow their viewership. Yes, that happens, but it’s also obviously not a sign of strength for their streamers either.
One Quick Theory on Declining Viewership Per Season
One quick theory before we get to each individual show’s analysis. I do think the serialized nature of television in the streaming era makes it harder than ever to keep viewers around. Back in the day, you could start a Friends or Seinfeld or NCIS or even ER in the middle and basically figure out what’s going on within an episode or two. I doubt most viewers started Law & Order (SVU or not) with episode one. Indeed, back in the heyday of Lost, folks warned that its complicated plot would lose viewers in later seasons, which happened!
Now, though, countless shows require their audiences to remember complex backstories, so it’s harder than ever to catch up. The one exception, I’d note, is that you could probably hop into The Pitt at the start of a season and figure everything out. With something like House of the Dragon or Avatar: The Last Airbender, that’s nearly impossible.
The streaming user experience has made this even harder as well.
That means, though, to grow your audience, a show has to be so compelling the old audience keeps returning—assuming they stayed subscribed to a service—and the new audience hears such good things they binge previous seasons. This happened most famously with Breaking Bad, but also likely happened with recent strong performer Severance.
This isn’t, of course, some terribly new or terribly original idea; I acknowledge that. But sometimes the biggest problems have the simplest causes. Those simple explanations aren’t sexy and won’t make articles go viral, but they have the handy benefit of being true.
The Slight Decline – House of the Dragon
Let’s start with the best performer among our three returning shows: House of the Dragon, which obviously stems from one of the greatest TV shows of all time, Game of Thrones, a show I think made HBO over $2 billion dollars and whose audiences exploded season after season, due to its greatness.
Thus, the first House of the Dragon season started off strong back in 2022, then 2024 did well too. And its third season is also very, very strong for HBO. In fact, it’s HBO’s biggest show in the 2020s. Here’s their datecdotes:
But you can also see a weakness in the numbers, as the third season is down 8% from season two. The good news is that 8% is a very small drop, especially compared to the 40-60% drops we’ve seen from other shows. The other viewership stats—from non-HBO sources—match this, with Nielsen having the current season at weeks of 10.6 and 15.5 million hours, compared to weeks of 12.4 and 20.4 million hours:
Samba TV also has strong numbers for House of the Dragon, with the show premiering in first place on its charts and lasting for at least three weeks. It will likely hang around on top of their weekly charts for weeks, as previous seasons have done. It will also likely make the Nielsen chart for weeks too. Though it won’t make the charts for as long as it did in the first season, since the current outing is only eight episodes long, not a (formerly?) classic HBO ten episodes.
The Steady Decay – The Bear
I’ll never understand why Hulu insisted on putting all of the episodes of The Bear out at one time. Do they have a problem where they have too many shows? I don’t think so. If anything, it’s the opposite.
And unlike House of the Dragon, this is a show that’s genuinely losing viewers each season. See…
The Bear’s seasons also aren’t lasting as long on the charts. The current season only made it for two weeks on Samba TV, at seventh place and tenth place. Previous season got up to fourth place for context.
Listen, not every show can grow its audience season-over-season, and that absolutely is the case with The Bear. Which happens. The challenge for Hulu/Disney is they need hits and this one clearly isn’t this quarter.
The Disappointment – Avatar: The Last Airbender (the 2024 live-action remake)
And now we get to the sharpest drop yet. Yes, The Bear has lost about half its audience over two seasons. Netflix had Avatar: The Last Airbender do that in one season:
It went from weeks of 42.6 and 32.3 million hours to 17.8 million hours in its first week. Yikes!
Samba TV only has it making the top ten for one week at tenth place. That’s really low. On Luminate, it only had 21.7 million hours in its first full week. (Its first season came out before Luminate started publishing top ten data, so I can’t make a comparison, but its first season had a very long run on those charts, so I expect it was much higher.)
So add that all up and yeah, Netflix’s second season problem is still very, very, very real.
Avatar: The Last Airbender was likely supposed to anchor the end of Q2, and frankly, it missed in a big way. So far, the lone bright spot for Netflix in Q2 of 2026 was I Will Find You, a show that won’t return for future seasons. As I’ve warned before, Netflix is losing their biggest shows, but not finding replacements. Even when they do have hits, they’re limited series! (Though sometimes their limited series find their way into second seasons.)
Quick Notes on TV
- HBO also had a new sketch comedy show, Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, the only other new TV show—scripted or unscripted—to make one of the viewership charts this week. It made Samba TV the week of 6-July, which is solid for an HBO show. We’ll see if it makes the acquired charts later, but I’m skeptical, given its short run time and weakness of its IMDb scores. (It has under 5K reviews.)
- You can also see that a handful of shows are dominating the top of the Samba TV charts again, including Dutton Ranch and Love Island USA. Dutton Ranch has made it to seven weeks on the Nielsen charts, so that thing is an out-and-out hit for Paramount from their (soon-to-be former) hitmaker Taylor Sheridan. Criminal Minds has also now made the Samba TV charts for two weeks after its new season dropped. Lastly, in Paramount+ news, The Agency made the Nielsen charts with 6.6 million hours. That’s low overall, but good for Paramount+.
- Whoa! Netflix’s I Will Find You went from “great” opening to elite second week, kicking up to over 40 million hours according to Nielsen. This is our first scripted entry in the 40 million hour club since February. Other numbers are similarly great, including three weeks on Samba TV and over 60 million hours on Luminate. In other big hits news, Love Island USA is up to 32.8 million hours. I don’t think this one will break the 40 million hour club, but at this point, I’m not betting against it. On Luminate, it had one week over 50 million hours.
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