The Bear Continues To Maul the Streaming Ratings
(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.)
Another week, another double dose of streaming ratings report. And it’s a good week for a double issue, since the week of 17-June didn’t have any new scripted shows come out on streaming. Not a single, scripted show. When the biggest show of the week is just a glossier version of a basic cable reality show, you know it’s a light week. (After the week of 1-July, the summer vacay schedule ends and things go back to “normal” or whatever that is now.)
The question is whether the overall number of new shows is going up or down, and it’s hard to say. Of course, I track the new shows coming out on the eight biggest streamers...
But the data is noisy. For the week of 24-Jun, almost every streamer had a new or returning scripted TV show. Sometimes two! Then the very next week, the week of the July Fourth vacation, the streamers had almost no new TV shows, but then the next two weeks were packed. And we still have a lot to discuss this week, including a big (but unsurprising) animated library title that made the charts, two big acquired shows top the charts for the first time, a Dallas cowboy cheerleaders TV show, a rare Hulu docu-series to make the charts, the first Tubi film or show to make a viewership chart that I track, a check-in on Nielsen’s The Gauge, great research on TV sources, and more.
After this week’s Streaming Ratings Report, this week looks busy with a lot of other news stories to cover, from the NBA’s new media rights deal, the WGA’s annual report (and state of writers in Hollywood), to antitrust and the new Presidential campaign, and the flops, bombs and misses of 2024 so far. Stay tuned!!!!
But let’s get to this week’s streaming viewership…
(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, and 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 17th to June 30th.)
Television - The Bear Continues to Grow Its Audience Year-Over-Year
When the first season of The Bear came out, I tried to tap the breaks on the “This is the show everyone is watching!” narrative that took hold that summer. Because, looking at the viewership data at that time, obviously not EVERYONE was watching it. It only made the Nielsen charts for one week!
But the strong IMDb ratings and eventual Emmy nominations did make me think the show could have a strong sophomore outing, and it did. Notably, FX has managed to release three seasons of their hit show three summers in a row, a rarity nowadays. (It helps that it’s a half-hour series.) This consistency—and the very high quality of the series—has helped grow its audience each season, one of the hallmarks of a great show in terms of viewership:
Other data points back this up. It has truly elite IMDb scores (an 8.6 on over 225K reviews). Samba TV said The Bear opened to 840K households in the US in the first five days, up from 550K for season two. It also made it to 3rd place on Samba TV’s TV charts. Of course, Disney+ provided a datecdote too that season three had 5.4 million “views” in the first four days, also up from 4.4 million from season two.
In other words, it’s safe to say The Bear is officially a hit, a genuine hit, and not just a “hit for Hulu” either. Though to toss some nuance into the conversation, I’m curious if it holds on as well as some of the elite-elite, huge returning series like I covered last week: Bridgerton, House of the Dragon, or The Boys. (Though, to toss nuance on the nuance, many of those are one-hour shows.)
That said, as I’ve noted with Baby Reindeer, the online conversation feels much bigger than the actual viewership numbers. (As a close relative told me, “Everyone is talking about it online.”) That doesn’t mean the show isn’t a hit, but sometimes the online conversation for certain shows is multiples higher than the equivalent viewership.
And yes, I agree that this show should have been binge-released (even just two episodes a week as a compromise), but Hulu seems really dug in on releasing this series in one batch of new episodes at a time, knee-capping the recap potential of the show. We’ll check in on the decay curve over the next few weeks to see if that decision made sense.
Television - What About Your Honor?
Last week, I got feedback that I missed potentially the biggest story of the week, Your Honor’s big Nielsen numbers. Indeed, in terms of total hours viewed, Your Honor took the top spot in the acquired ratings on the Nielsen charts for two weeks and the top show period the week of 24-June:
Of course, I didn’t quite ignore it, since I cautiously wondered if it could be this year’s “Suits”, as in this summer’s Netflix phenomenon from another previous home. (Toss Manifest into this analogy too.) That’s about as big of praise as it gets!
Those are great numbers. Your Honor has also made the Samba TV charts for five weeks straight, which is a long run for that dataset. As a reminder, Samba TV tracks by unique households watching, not total hours viewed, so having more episodes or longer run-time doesn’t benefit you.
The limiting factor for Your Honor will, though, be the number of episodes. It just doesn’t have nearly as many episodes as other broadcast shows, only twenty total episodes to date. As such, I expect it to drop off much quicker than Suits or Manifest. I like Paramount Global’s strategy to license their content to Netflix, since it boosts awareness for their wholly-owned shows, without really cannibalizing current season viewership. Plus, you know, the paycheck.
Quick Notes on TV
Netflix’s latest sports docu-series America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders had 5.9 million hours in week one and 9.3 million in week two. Honestly, I kind of thought that this show would do better (it felt like the most notable new show on a very light week) but then again, it’s basically just a reboot of a CMT channel show, Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team, so this viewership is probably fine. I found an old Deadline article that touted CMT’s show as a huge ratings driver for CMT, but it didn’t have any specific numbers I could compare to this. I’d argue that this show wasn’t a miss, but that depends on the budget and whether Netflix overpaid.
