Did Streaming TV Finally Get Its Mojo Back This Week?

(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.)

Let’s start off with some very fun news:

I’m expanding my blogroll!

I take a look at my blogroll (my old school blogging term for my fellow newsletter and Substack recommendations) every year around this time, and this year, I’m adding…

• Business of TV by Jen Topping, one of my favorite TV/film industry business newsletters, a terrific combination of news roundup and analysis, with a focus on what producers need to know.

• Underexposed by Alex Rollins Berg, one of my favorite film criticism newsletters. I don’t recommend (or really read) many newsletters in this space, but Rollins Berg separates himself from the pack with his unique topics. Seriously, this guy writes about things no one else is, like “trash” Disney films, pillow shots, and more.

• StreamScoop by Josh Matthews. My team uses this newsletter every week to double check our work and that’s about the best compliment I can give a fellow newsletter!

• Projections by Sean Fennessy. Professional jealousy aside (he bumped me from third to fourth on the Substack bestsellers chart!), Fennessey is obviously a must-read newsletter if you care about cinema.

  ADVERTISEMENT

I recommend a lot of newsletters, but I actually have a pretty high bar for a shout out. There are so many great newsletters out there right now—I just discovered two great new Substacks in the last week—so it’s not easy to make the blogroll. My criteria is deceptively simple: write great stuff, publish regularly, and be kind (which is easier said than done). Of those, publishing regularly is the main reason most newsletters don’t make the cut.

Okay, on to this week’s issue. I’m looking at three new TV shows that popped on the charts: Paramount+’s Dutton Ranch, Netflix’s Nemesis and Prime Video’s Off Campus. They go up against a big week for streaming “specials”: Netflix’s The Roast of Kevin Hart, Netflix’s Ronda Rousey-Gina Carano fight, Peacock/YouTube’s The Eurovision Song Contest and Prime Video’s Academy of Country Music Awards. All that, plus Prime Video quietly ends one of their buzziest series, The Boys continues to roll, a slew of Netflix shows fall off the charts, Sony tries to steal Netflix’s kids animated thunder, Apple TV+ solidifies one of their “hits for them, two UK-imports that flopped in the US, a new survey on who’s cool (and which celebrities most Americans haven’t heard of), 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 March 11th to March 17th, 2026.

You can find a link to my terminology here.)

Best of all, I’m unlocking this edition of the Streaming Ratings Report for everyone! I realize that not many free subscribers realize how much content truly lives behind my paywall, so check it out! And please subscribe!

Is this the week that TV finally gets its spring mojo back? We’ve had a few down weeks on the Nielsen top ten charts. One way to track this is by looking at the top show by total hours viewed, and we haven’t seen a show eclipse 25 million hours since Virgin River the week of 9-March. The only show to break 20 million hours since was The Pitt’s finale episode.

All to say, we haven’t had a new show smash the viewership charts in a bit.

But this week, the streamers took some big swings to try to reverse that slide this week. Here’s the Nielsen top ten list:

No TV shows got over 20 million hours again—one special did, but I’ll discuss it in the film section—so this is another disappointing start. But there are some glimmers of hope…

Let’s start with the obvious: Taylor Sheridan.

The dude makes hits and looks to have another on his hands. His latest is Dutton Ranch, a spinoff of Yellowstone, but not branded that way in the title for legal reasons. It’s also a weekly release—smart!—so its opening week of 12.1 million hours has to be taken in that context. If it lasts on the charts for weeks—like say Landman—it will easily eclipse the top binge-released shows of Q2 so far.

And we have reason to suspect it will. It opened to 9.2 million hours on Luminate and lasts at least three weeks on those charts, peaking at 18.3 million hours. (See chart in next section.) Paramount+ also put out a datecdote calling it their biggest launch to date, with 12.9 million “streaming views” in the first seven days, passing The Madison, which had 8.0 million views in its first ten days. (Reminder: The Madison only had six episodes at launch, which is partially why it dropped off so quickly. Also, I hate when companies use different time periods on their datecdotes!)

It’s not all good news, though. We haven’t seen Dutton Ranch make the Samba TV charts, and popular Paramount+ shows have made those rankings. It also has an elite IMDb score (an 8.4) but on only 9.3K reviews, which isn’t a great number of reviews. While Sheridan shows skew older—and hence has fewer IMDb reviews—that’s still low.

We have to wait and see how long this one lasts on the charts before we can judge, but I predict good things.

The data is more mixed for Netflix’s Nemesis, a binge-released crime show from the creator of Starz’s Power. It only opened to 13.9 million hours on Nielsen, so it didn’t reverse Netflix’s Q2 slide so far:

Other data is mixed. It did well on Samba TV, but went from 10th to fourth place, and then falls off the charts.

Luminate is a bit better—30.0 million hours, then 25.0, then 11.0—but that’s more evidence it will likely burn bright, then fall off the charts. That’s a little ahead of Man on Fire, though that show had seven episodes to Nemesis’ eight. Lastly, its IMDb rating is poor, only a 6.0 on 4.3K IMDb reviews.

So like I said, if this does well next week, it may be Netflix’s best Q2 show so far, but it doesn’t look great or elite. (Like say Untamed from last year.)

The last show comes from Prime Video, and it’s an original premise:

A hockey show with lots of sex!!!

I speak of Off Campus, a college drama about hockey that has lots of sex scenes. It opened to 8.6 million hours on Prime Video, which is fine, though low compared to other Prime Video debuts.

Like Dutton Ranch, though, we have some signs of hope. On the Luminate charts, it lasts for four weeks, peaking at 12.9 million hours, followed by weeks of 9.8 and 7.5 million hours. Those aren’t huge numbers, but not a big slide. Next, it has terrific IMDb scores, an 8.0 on 33K reviews. Lastly, Amazon put out a vague datecdote saying it “reached” 36 million viewers in 12 days, only behind their two biggest debuts of all time, Fallout and Rings of Power.

I do have a theory that sometimes certain films or shows with graphic sex scenes get replayed a lot for…those scenes. Or passed around. I think this may have happened with Euphoria, Heated Rivalry, and now Off Campus. This can help metrics like “reach”, while keeping total hours viewed a bit lower. I’m not saying that happened here, but it may have.

Prime Video binge-released it, so it will likely burn bright than fade out. For example, on Samba TV, it only lasted one week on the charts, not a sign of a huge smash.

To close, I have to make a comparison, but I really don’t want to. Sigh. There was another sexy hockey show that, whenever I mention it, folks get upset, saying it doesn’t matter what the viewership numbers say, it was really, really, really popular/its fanbase is super engaged. Anyways, yeah, Off Campus has as much viewership in its first week (8.6 million hours) as Heated Rivalry had in its first five weeks (8.7 million hours). Still, we’ll see how long it lasts on the charts.

• Netflix’s dating show Perfect Match showed up for its fourth season on Netflix this week and had a mixed debut. It missed the Nielsen and Samba TV charts entirely, but did land on Luminate. It amassed weeks of 8.7 and 7.1 million hours, then falls off. Overall, this is a disappointing outing, and even Netflix may be running out of patience with it. The first season started with a twelve-episode order, which dropped to ten for the next two seasons, and now it’s down to eight. Compared to Love is Blind, this isn’t a huge smash hit, despite this edition featuring reality stars in and around Netflix’s TV universe.

• HBO’s Rooster—reminder, the Steve Carell dramedy—fell off the Samba TV charts after a very good ten-week run. (Though HBO shows tend to over-perform on Samba TV compared to Nielsen and they often aren’t eligible for Luminate.) HBO also provided a datecdote that it was their “most watched debut comedy” in fifteen years, which is a pretty parsed category, with 6.5 million average viewers per episode and 2.2 million viewers in the first three days. It never made the Nielsen charts, so I’d say it’s a hit for HBO for comedies, but probably not a smash. In other HBO news, Euphoria made the Nielsen charts again, with 9.6 million hours, while remaining either first, second or third on the Samba TV charts.

• Peacock’s M.I.A. made the Nielsen charts for another week, creeping up to 6.1 million hours from 5.6 million the week before. It also made Luminate again, with 9.3 million hours, but still hasn’t made Samba TV. Overall, I’d still call this binge-released series “fine”, and maybe a “hit for Peacock”.

• Prime Video’s The Boys moved up to third on the charts with 16.9 million hours in its sixth week, so it’s now eighth overall among season five shows released since 2020, a great accomplishment. It’s still going strong on Samba TV as well, so will likely keep climbing the charts. Meanwhile, Citadel fell off the Luminate charts and hasn’t reappeared on the Nielsen or Samba TV charts. That show is a big miss.

• Netflix’s Worst Ex Ever fell to 12.5 million hours from 13.0 million hours on the Nielsen charts. For a docu-series, these are still fine numbers, but it will likely drop off Nielsen next week, as it fell off Samba TV after just a two-week run.

• Hey, look at that! Your Friends and Neighbors made the Nielsen charts, after having long runs on both Samba TV and Luminate. As I mea culpa’d two days ago, that show isn’t a miss. (Again, though, at only 5.7 million hours, I wouldn’t call it a hit either.) But you know what shows may be misses? The ones that dropped off the Nielsen charts after short runs, including Running Point (three weeks), Man on Fire (two weeks), and Lord of the Flies (one week). Given Netflix’s short episode counts, shows run for shorter times than I’ve ever seen. These numbers wouldn’t be misses for other streamers, but they are for Netflix.

• The big new show on the acquired TV charts is The First 48, a reality show following detectives in their first two days after getting a case. This show just came to Netflix, but it streams like…everywhere. Meanwhile, La Brea continues to make the acquired charts, as the recent “broadcast show to come to Netflix and all the cord-cutters are watching it for the first time” phenomenon.

• We’ve got a tie for this week’s “Miss of the Week” winner, and both are UK-imports: Hulu’s dramedy Rivals, and the third season, er, film-length finale episode of Prime Video’s Good Omens. This is yet more evidence that foreign TV shows (even from English-speaking countries like the UK) can struggle in the US. I’ve been told that Rivals is popular in the UK (the rare streaming show to make BARB, their rating system) but this report focuses on the US. As for Good Omens, that feels like a pricey miss. Good Omens does have elite IMDb scores, even for a genre show.

• As for other DNBs or “Dogs Not Barking” of the week (my term for any show or film that doesn’t make any of the ratings charts that I track, find an explainer here), the most notable is Netflix’s Devil May Cry. Samba TV said that this show lost half its audience this season, though they’ve been citing similar drops for a lot of shows. (I wonder if their methodology changed.) Regardless, this show is ending after its next season. Adult animation and anime-influenced media just aren’t as popular as much of the hype makes it out to be. Next up, HBO Max’s On The Roam, starring Jason Momoa, came out for season two and missed the charts; you just don’t see as many celebrity travel docu-series as you used to, probably because they didn’t work.

• Four different shows switched streamers: Wonder Channel’s It’s Not Like That headed to Prime Video after a few months. BET+’s Zatima premiered on Paramount+, as has been happening with a lot of BET+ shows these days. Everyone is Doing Great left Hulu for Netflix, but this one looks like an independent production. Netflix grabbed the rights to Pop Culture Jeopardy! It didn’t chart, but I do like that it came out daily. None of these shows made the charts.

• As for foreign-language shows this week, Between Father and Son (from Mexico) didn’t chart, but the more notable title is Berlin and the Lady With an Ermine (from Spain), since past Money Heist spinoffs have charted. I will note that The WONDERfools (from South Korea) missed the charts this week, but it is projected to make the charts next week, the rare foreign-language show to actually do that, though it’s still a flop.

• As for last week’s misses, I can confirm that Netflix’s Legends, Apple TV’s Widow’s Bay and Paramount+’s RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars all missed the charts.

“Specials” are a tricky category for streaming ratings. Many specials—especially sports—don’t fall under Nielsen’s regular purview, so we either have to hope folks announce or leak the data for us. Otherwise, we’re left wondering how they did.

This week, we had three specials fall into this zone—no data—and one which fortunately made the ratings charts.

Let’s start with what we do know: the Roast of Kevin Hart did very well for Netflix. It had a lot of buzz and translated that buzz into viewership. It topped the Samba TV charts for one week:

Yeah, that’s a short run, but that’s to be expected for a special. It had big numbers on both Nielsen and Luminate, getting up to 21.7 million on Luminate:

It also got a whopping 22.5 million hours according to Nielsen, which is a big number, but slightly less than The Roast of Tom Brady (both globally and domestic) which topped out over 27 million hours in the US:

Overall, those are good numbers. They also likely helped propel Kevin Hart’s latest TV show, Funny AF with Kevin Hart, onto the Nielsen and Samba TV charts. If Netflix kept costs mostly in check for the roast—and I have no idea what they paid for his services—this was a good performance.

While Netflix didn’t let its latest sporting special hit the Nielsen ratings charts, they did release some datecdotes on the Ronda Rousey versus Gina Carano MMA fight on Netflix. Overall, the fight was a bit of a bust, lasting under a minute, so that will hurt its ratings. Here’s global data comparison from Whats-On-Netflix, and I’d highlight the 12.4 million average viewers:

After each fight, Netflix provides different metrics from different companies and…that’s frustrating. To say it politely. Good data analysis stems from comparing things apples-to-apples, and Netflix makes that deliberately hard to do, probably on purpose. In this case, while I think the fight was popular in the U.S., there seems to be some decline in viewership globally, implying Netflix may be running out of top-end fight specials to stream. Using different metrics makes that harder to parse.

Now, we don’t know much about how the other two specials performed. Prime Video hasn’t released data on the Academy of Country Music for years now, though they do keep renewing the awards show. I’ve always doubted that it drives that much tune-in, and I’d bet that the show is garnering a lot fewer viewers than when it was on broadcast. (Fun fact: not that awards shows tend to get tons of views, but this one has…11 on IMDb as of this moment.)

Meanwhile, the Eurovision Song Contest is insanely popular in Europe, but we have little visibility here in the States. It’s never charted for Peacock, and now it streams on YouTube as well. You can check out the track list, which is topped by one song with 20 million views, but most videos were much smaller than that. Again, those are global numbers, so it’s tough to say what they translate to in terms of U.S. viewership.

Looking for lessons across these sporting events, it remains the same: specials—especially non-Netflix specials—struggle to resonate with viewers, mostly due to user experience issues.

• Sony’s GOAT came to Netflix after just breaking the $100 million mark at the domestic box office earlier this year. It opened to 17.9 million hours, so the obvious comparison is to Swapped, a film that’s now Netflix’s second or third best kids film this decade (and likely before, though I don’t have data for it). In this case, GOAT, a popular-but-not-blockbuster kids animated title, bested Swapped by 9.5 million hours. It also made Samba TV for two weeks, at fourth and third place. (It isn’t eligible for the Luminate charts.) Yeah, I’d say this is more evidence that even non-blockbuster theatrical runs can succeed on streaming, but it’s just one data point. I do think, though, that Sony films moving off the ad-tier in 2026 will likely boost their overall viewership numbers.

• Netflix’s biggest film of the week may end up being The Crash, which gets up to first place on the Samba TV charts. (See above.) This true crime doc also made Nielsen with 7.9 million hours. The Lifetime Original Stolen Baby: The Murder of Heidi Broussard came to Netflix on 15-May and made the charts as well, both Nielsen and Samba TV. It also streams on Hulu.

• In previous film news, Greenland 2: Migration (on HBO Max) made the Nielsen top ten in its second week. So it’s not a “dog not barking” but still isn’t a huge hit. Netflix’s Remarkably Bright Creatures had a small slide, going to 11.6 million hours in its second week. Send Help made the charts for a second week, too, though down to 4.4 million hours.

• For the film “Miss of the Week”, I’d have to pick Disney+’s The Punisher: One Last Kill by default, since the only other new films this week were both documentaries that made the charts. This standalone special/episode is short, about an hour long, so it’s not a big miss. It does have great IMDb scores, a 7.1 on 42K reviews, though Marvel shows do well on IMDb. This is the second standalone special with Jon Bernthal from a Disney streamer in two weeks, along with Hulu’s standalone The Bear episode, Gary, from last week.

• Other misses include Netflix’s Marty, Life Is Short, which missed Nielsen, The Black Phone 2, which left Peacock for Netflix, but didn’t chart, and Hulu’s latest standup special, Lisa Ann Walter: It Was An Accident. Netflix also started a spinoff of Untold series of films set in the UK, but it hasn’t charted yet. On Luminate, Kartavya made the charts at a lowly 1.3 million hours.

At the beginning of May, Instagram purged millions of followers from hundreds of thousands of accounts. And the impact was huge for some creators: Kylie Jenner lost 14 million followers.

According to Inc, no creator lost more than 2.5% of their followers, but still, it shows how, when it comes to social media metrics, they’re often far gaudier than reality. Imagine if Instagram and other sites deactivated inactive accounts?

This has real ramifications for data analysis. Many reporters cite social media followers much, much too credulously. As this anecdote shows, they can be changed relatively easily. In the future, AI-powered bots may make this even worse (and harder to detect).

I’m kicking myself, because I didn’t submit my guesses for YouGov’s quiz on the “coolest” celebrities and politicians, but I think I could have done well, mainly because I remember reading, years ago, an article about how cool Samuel L Jackson is, and I would have guessed that political figures were more divisive.

Mainly, though, I love YouGov’s poll because it illustrates how divided/fractured the media landscape is these days. Many Americans have no clue who celebrities like Sabrina Carpenter, Sydney Sweeney, Olivio Rodrigo and even Zendaya are! Half of Americans aren’t sure how they feel about BTS!

A later article shared that most Americans have never heard of Alex Cooper.

Perhaps this reflects polling biases (young people don’t answer their phones to take surveys like this) but I assume YouGov accounted for that. This is also pretty good data that it is true we don’t live in a “monoculture” anymore.

According to Deadline, ABC News’ The Mystery of Richard Simmons – A Diane Sawyer Special racked up 10.2 million viewers on ABC, Disney+ and Hulu over its first month, doubling its same day viewership. An encore special got 2.7 million (which sort of shows the floor for broadcast television these days). Overall, those are impressive numbers for a docu-series, showing that this genre is popular, regardless of the platform.

Two quick basketball updates. The NBA draft averaged 2.3 million viewers, which feels pretty solid for a ceremony that just determines draft order.

Meanwhile, the WNBA season opener featuring Caitlin Clark and Paige Bueckers averaged 2.5 million viewers, the second highest mark ever. As someone who’s bullish on the WNBA, I’d like to see these overall numbers creep a bit higher, but this is really a solid open.

After a brief dead zone, we’ve got a busy month ahead of us. Next week, the Duffer Bros. try to find their next hit show with The Boroughs (though they’re only executive producing it), Apple TV has a comedy crime thriller starring Tatiana Maslany, The Chi returns to Showtime/Paramount+ Premium. And some big movies head to streaming: The Bride! on HBO Max, Prime Video’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War and Netflix’s Sacha Baron Cohen gender-switch comedy, Ladies First.

Later this month, The Four Seasons and A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder return to Netflix for their second seasons, and Deli Boys returns to Hulu. Meanwhile, Spider-Noir might be Prime Video’s latest hit. Apple TV has a For All Mankind spinoff, Star City, Netflix has a true crime drama, The Witness, Hulu has a new Mindy Kaling comedy, and Apple TV has a Cape Fear reboot. But the biggest new show has to be Love Island USA returning to Peacock. In terms of movies, it’s Angel’s David (now on Netflix) up against Disney/Pixar’s Hoppers, and Scream 7 up against Office Romance on Netflix.

Long term, Disney+ put Hocus Pocus 3 into pre-production and I have to ask, what took so long? This is one of the biggest streaming films of all time. Also, Matt Shakman (who I like) is rebooting the Planet of the Apes. As someone who saw the last Planet of the Apes film in theaters, I have to say: booo! Finally, there are not one, not two, not three, but four (four!) Fast & Furious shows are coming to NBCUniversal TV platforms, and Vinny D is EPing. I couldn’t be happier.