Did Agatha Bewitch the Audiences? Did The Penguin Take Over? Or Did Crime Kill Them Both?

The Streaming Ratings Report for 18-Oct-2024

(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.)

---

This week’s Streaming Ratings Report is coming out today (instead of last week) because the Nielsen ratings were delayed by a day last week. Sure, I’d rather have the data sooner, but I appreciate analytics companies who delay their data to get it right, rather than rush to get it out. I’d rather have accuracy than timeliness.

We’ve got a ton of stuff to get to, but first, I’ve had some shoutouts from other newsletters, and I wanted to share them with you.

• My favorite gaming ratings charts newsletter, Game Discover Co, gave me a shout out, talking about filter bubbles and video games ratings charts, making a connection I just loved.

• Speaking of favorite newsletters covering non-Hollywood media, Kathleen Schmidt of Publishing Confidential, my favorite newsletter on publishing, cited me as one of the Substack newsletters she loves, and I can say: the feeling is mutual!

• Stephen Follows published a breakdown on film newsletters on Substack, and my newsletter made the list of “most recommended” newsletters. I’m so complimented!

• Finally, Ted Hope gave my article on the “Four Horsemen of the Media-pocalypse” two shouts outs, but I want to highlight the end of his post, “What Should The Non-Dependent Filmmaker Be Most Concerned About Right Now?” where Ted disagrees with my choices in about the most respectful way possible. This might as well be a textbook on how to disagree with someone on the internet and still advance the conversation. If more of the internet culture reflected how Ted Hope writes, it would be a much nicer place to hang out. (And hopefully this is a sign that Substack is cultivating that very culture.)

On to this week’s issue, and hoo boy, do we have an absolute gem of an issue. We got an MCU versus DC TV show showdown, which is basically a mini-tour through the streaming ratings landscape. And we have a true crime showdown between Paramount+’s Tulsa King and Netflix’s latest season of Monster. All of these shows made the charts, but which ones were hits and which ones underwhelmed? That, plus both Paramount+ and Prime Video had big misses, a news animated kids film (The Garfield Movie on Netflix’s paid tier), a new horror film (A24’s I Saw the TV Glow on Max), and a straight-to-streaming prestige film, His Three Daughters, on Netflix, plus a look at ads on streaming vs. linear, book sales going up, some big broadcast debuts, all the flops, bombs and misses for the week, and a 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, 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 September 16th to September 22nd.)

Television - A Marvel versus DC Showdown…

Due to various quirks in the progress of the streaming wars, we’ve never really had a DC show face off against a Marvel show on streaming.¹

Marvel had a few TV shows in the 2000s, including Agents of Shield on ABC and then some shows on Netflix (most notably Daredevil), but Disney only got in on the streaming TV game (with Marvel Originals coming from Marvel Studios/Kevin Feige) after they launched Disney+. After doing quite well at first—WandaVision, Loki, Hawkeye—Disney’s Marvel shows have been on somewhat of a slide, with misses like Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, Secret Invasion and Echo.

In contrast, DC hasn’t made a ton of streaming TV shows. Instead, they focused on broadcast shows starting in the 2000s, with a series of long-running shows on The CW (starting with Smallville, then onto Arrow, which kickstarted the whole Arrow-verse). Peacemaker from 2022 is probably the closest DC universe streaming-only show, but that show predated the Nielsen top ten, since Nielsen didn’t start tracking HBO Max/Max until May of 2022. (Oh, they also had Doom Patrol and Titans on the short-lived DC Universe streamer/comics platform.)

Either way, both streamers and both comic book companies need/want a hit. So the question for today is who won the latest comic book showdown:

• Agatha All Along on Disney+, a fantasy/horror half-hour starring a sub-C tier character. (And also the—spoiler—bad guy from WandaVision.)

• The Penguin on HBO/Max, an hour-long crime show starring one of Batman’s primary villains, which makes him a C-or-B tier DC character. (And also a villain from the underrated-but-actually-quite popular The Batman (2022) film.)

At this point, I’d give the lead to The Penguin, though it’s close, but neither show “smashed” the ratings charts in week one.

Let’s start with Samba TV. Agatha All Along has missed the Samba TV charts so far, which is a bad sign. As a reminder, Samba TV provides “unique households” watching, so presumably, Agatha All Along’s half-hour runtime doesn’t factor in (as much) in that metric, yet it hasn’t made the charts. Meanwhile, The Penguin has been the number one show over that time.

We also got a Samba TV “datecdote”—where they tell us the specific number of households over a given time period—for The Penguin, but not for Agatha All Along. At 3.2 million hours through four days, that’s an elite number for streaming shows, besting even Stranger Things:

Shifting to Nielsen, the data is more mixed. In this case, Agatha All Along made the charts at 7.1 million hours, but The Penguin missed the Nielsen charts. Normally, I’d wonder if HBO’s Sunday release impacted the totals, but HBO actually put out The Penguin on a Thursday this week. Instead, it just didn’t have enough viewership to make the Acquired Nielsen top ten. (The tenth place show was Cocomelon with 8.5 million hours, so just above Agatha All Along’s total.) We’ll see if it shows up in later weeks.

As for Agatha All Along, it’s a fairly weak opening for Marvel shows. It did about what WandaVision did, but this show debuted on a Wednesday, and WandaVision came out on a Friday. (That show also gained a lot of steam via positive word of mouth during its run.)

In this case, Luminate’s data matches Nielsen and only had 5.1 million hours for Agatha All Along, similar to Nielsen. (We don’t have any other Marvel shows to compare it to in the Luminate data set since it only goes back to March.) But Luminate doesn’t track HBO-first/linear TV shows.

When it comes to IMDb data, both shows did well, but The Penguin wins handily. It has an 8.8 on 41K reviews, whereas Agatha All Along has a 6.9 on 27K reviews, with some potential downvoting campaign going on. (Over the last few years, I’ve now noticed that nearly every show has deliberate downvoting and upvoting campaigns.) Of course, genre/superhero shows over-index on IMDb, and both these shows would need to eclipse 100K reviews to enter the “elite” tier compared to other superhero shows.

As for interest charts, Agatha All Along wins that battle, taking the top spot on TV Time and doing better on JustWatch, but The Penguin did better on the Reelgood charts.

That just leaves…what the companies themselves said in their strategically-released datecdotes. If I sound resigned, I am a little bit, because I trust the third-party sources more because they release data regularly, not selectively. In this case, HBO told us The Penguin had 5.3 million unique viewers in its “opening weekend”, which was the “biggest four day audience for a new series” around the world. HBO also told us that 1.35 million viewers tuned in live. Moreover, only 1.6 million tuned in live for the second episode. At this point, HBO has provided us with a bunch of live/same-day viewership, and that number is fairly weak for HBO:

Again, it’s better than most of their shows but pales compared to House of the Dragon or The Last of Us. (Interestingly, HBO pointed out that they’re going up against Sunday Night Football, as the prohibitive explanation for the weakness in live viewing. Interesting.)

Disney also got in on the game, because they’ve put out a few datecdotes now, and silence would probably be louder at this point. They said Agatha All Along hit 9.3 million “views” in its first week. A week is a long time for Disney, but here’s how Agatha stacks up:

That’s a lot of data points from Disney, so I’ll probably need to re-organize that chart at some point. At best, I’d say Agatha opened about as well as The Acolyte, maybe a little weaker globally, so we’ll see if it has a better week-to-week performance than the latter, which infamously tanked after its debut.

Taken together, yeah, the streaming wars has more data than ever, making sense of it now is the tough part. Overall, I don’t think either show hit the “elite” or even “great” tier yet. The Penguin is probably closer, though, to achieve that greatness. Both can also point to strong metrics, like The Penguin’s terrific Samba TV or IMDb numbers or Agatha All Along’s great interest chart metrics.

And like other “genre” shows I’ve covered a lot recently, both are coming out weekly, so the story will be told over the next eight weeks, not today. For weekly series, word of mouth is what determines success or failure.

Television - On “Crime” Corner

Let us never forget:

Crime sells.

That’s an unfortunate truism for Hollywood, but it is the reality. So, while superheroes rule the box office, as we saw above, they’ve sort of fallen back to earth on TV. (And The Penguin is actually a crime show, not a superhero drama.) The other two big shows of the week were crime shows.