(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, I wanted to highlight Rick Porter’s analysis of Netflix’s semi-annual data dump. (RIP for these semi-annual data drops, since they’re going “annual” after this report.) Like I’ve written before, it’s a case study in power laws at work:
The biggest, most popular TV shows and films aren’t just a bit more popular than other TV shows and films; they’re orders of magnitude more popular (meaning ten, a hundred or a thousand times more popular).
When I spent much of Q2 pointing out that Netflix’s biggest shows were underperforming, I could fairly imagine someone pushing back, arguing, “Hits don’t matter! It’s all about distribution.” And yet…The top 500 TV shows made up 50% of all views in H1, meaning that hits really do matter. When hits don’t perform, it’s going to impact Netflix’s overall performance. Having a deep catalogue matters, obviously, but it’s still a hits driven business and content is king.
On to this week’s issue. Last week, I took a quick vacation, so we have a double issue coming up. The weeks of 29-June and 6-July were fairly light in terms of new shows and films—heck, the week of 6-July might be one of the lightest I’ve ever seen with just seven new English-language titles, continuing a trend I just wrote about—but we still have a bunch of fun shows and films to talk about, including a Paramount+ show making it into the top twenty of all streaming debuts, Love Island USA’s continued dominance, Apple TV’s Silo’s strong third season opening (for them), an broadcast-to-Netflix show that didn’t make the Nielsen charts, the latest remix of Bluey episodes on Disney+, a look at smaller streamers (and their deluge of shows), all the flops, bombs and misses, and a whole lot more.
But we start with a trio of dramas vying for attention.
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 29th to July 6th, 2026.
You can find a link to my terminology here.)
Television – Streaming Schedules Melodramas for Fourth of July
As I review the new shows each week in streaming, it surprises me how, some weeks, every show feels the same. Or at least appeals to similar audiences. That happened this week looking at the three biggest new scripted shows:
- The Five-Star Weekend on Peacock
- Little House on the Prairie on Netflix
- Elle on Prime Video
For lack of a better word, each skews “female”. Prime Video and Paramount+’s “Dad TV” this is not. You have a drama starring elite actresses on Peacock, a family-friendly drama on Netflix, and a YA-ish reboot from Prime Video, but all seem focused on drama/melodrama versus action/genre thrills.
Listen, these schedules are usually locked months in advance, but this still isn’t great programming. Multiple streamers programming to the same audience doesn’t tend to work out since you’re naturally splitting the audience. The streamers binge-releasing each of these shows only exacerbates this.
So how did they do? I’d say “good” to “fine” to “meh”, but a lot depends on which streamer and the expectations therein.
Let’s start with a show that actually did worse in the ratings, but better overall in context. Little House on the Prairie on Netflix (LHoN) actually bested The Five-Star Weekend in most viewership categories. Still, Five-Star is another “hit for Peacock”, and that service needs hits. Again, it’s not a “hit” in general, since it only had 10.5 million hours in its first week for a binge-released, eight-episode series. But that’s on the higher end for Peacock:
(The caveat here is Poker Face came out weekly, meaning it did even better with fewer episodes.)
Luminate had similar numbers, with the show peaking at 23.3 million hours before falling to 14.4 million hours. (The difference in the hours per week between Nielsen and Luminate has a lot to do with when their time periods start. Nielsen starts on a Monday; Luminate on a Thursday.) On Samba TV, it made it for two weeks, at seventh and fourth place.
Though again, this show isn’t a huge hit. On IMDb, it only got 4.2K reviews, which is less than ideal (though it has a rating above a seven, meaning it’s well liked). Yes, IMDb is biased against dramas, but that’s still low. Meanwhile, barely breaking the 10 million hour mark on Nielsen isn’t great and a four-week run on Luminate is solid, but also not world beating.
That said, this is the first of three times I’ll mention Peacock today, which is great for that streamer. I mean, two years ago most Peacock shows just missed the viewership charts entirely and I mostly discussed Peacock’s TV shows in the “misses” section of the SRR! I do grade them on a curve compared to bigger streamers like Netflix and Prime Video, but they’re on a roll. Peacock has already renewed The Five-Star Weekend for a second season, and I can see why.
Meanwhile, Netflix needs a hit. Earlier this year, I speculated that Netflix renewed Little House on the Prairie (LHoP) early because they expected it to become a hit. I did too, and thought they might have their next Bridgerton on their hands. Do they? At 15.4 million hours to start on Nielsen, no, they do not…
I mean, sure, it’s not the next Bridgerton, but what is? Really, Bridgerton had huge growth into its second, third and fourth weeks. But LHoP isn’t even the new Sweet Magnolias or Outer Banks. Its Samba TV numbers were fine, going from eighth to third overall, then it only had one more week on the charts before dropping off. Again, for Samba TV/Netflix binge-released shows, that’s not terrible. But not great either.
Luminate probably had its best numbers, as LHoP got up to 43.3 million hours on its four-week run on those charts. That ties it with a slew of shows at 24th on the single best weeks on Luminate since May of 2024. The caveat is that some shows that got those numbers were weekly releases that got stronger over time, like Love Island USA, Landman (which had those numbers twice), or Fallout. On IMDb, it had similar numbers to The Five-Star Weekend, a 7.3 on 7.3K reviews, meaning it’s well-liked.
Again, I’m probably grading on a reverse curve here, in that I know Netflix needs some bigger hits, and this looked like a great candidate. Netflix would love to say, “Here’s our next Bridgerton” but can’t. LHoP is also based on fairly notable, though old, IP. Plus, they already renewed it for a second season. But right now it may not pass “The Obliterated Line” in the US, and it didn’t debut well globally.
I’m guessing Elle also disappointed its streamer. Post-MGM merger, Amazon really leaned into their IP, and a TV reboot/spinoff of Legally Blonde was high on that list. (Like LHoP, this one also got an early renewal.) The good news is that it did make the Nielsen charts, with two weeks at 8.3 million hours each so far. The bad news is how that stacks up for Prime Video to recent dramas with less buzzy IP:
A League of Their Own and Daisy Jones & the Six both got cancelled after one season. Unlike Peacock, whose new show only had slightly higher numbers, Prime Video has seen shows bust out in a big way, which makes these numbers more disappointing.
Other numbers aren’t great either. It never made Samba TV, so that’s a big miss, and it made Luminate, but for only two weeks with 13.2 and 6.8 million hours. (So it will likely miss the Nielsen charts the week of 13-July.) Remarkably, it had a 7.0 on 7.6K IMDb reviews, so all three of these new shows are very similar in ratings according to IMDb.
Overall, I put these shows in the rough order of success I see them as. The Five-Star Weekend did have a high profile cast, but it did well for Peacock, one of their top five debuts all time. Netflix and Prime Video both leveraged IP, and of the two, Netflix clearly did better (though not as well as they hoped). And that leaves both services still looking for their next big hit.
This is also another lesson that IP doesn’t translate as well to TV as it does in film. A TV show needs to be great on its own to keep customers coming back, and Type 2 IP (meaning reboots and spinoffs) doesn’t guarantee that. That said, don’t mistake a few examples for data analysis. As we’ll see later, three TV shows based on pre-existing IP (at least two scripted hits and one unscripted spinoff) are doing very, very well on streaming right now.
Quick Notes on TV
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…
- Where Dutton Ranch ranks on the season one all time charts…
- Whether Apple TV’s Silo is a hit…
- A Netflix docu-series that bested Little House on the Prairie…
- The acquired show that came to Netflix and didn’t become a hit…
- A look at the crazy number of shows on some very small, niche streamers…
- Over eleven more charts and graphs…
- All the flops, bombs and misses..
- And more…
…please subscribe! We can only keep doing this great work with your support.
