HBO’s Elite 2026 Run Continues Unabated...And R-Rated Comedies Are Struggling Everywhere
The Streaming Ratings Report for 13-Apr-26
(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, spare me two quick asides, one on writing and one on websites.
First, I’ve noticed that I personalize companies, writing “they” instead of “it” (or “their” instead of “its”) when writing about streamers or media conglomerates. This might be a usage “mistake”, but I’m not changing my style anytime soon. It might be slightly idiosyncratic, but idiosyncratic choices serve to make writing more interesting, in my opinion.1
Second, have you ever noticed that some websites, instead of dating their articles, automatically write “X days ago” instead of an actual date? YouTube does it (forcing you to click the description to find the actual date), but another beloved sports website (which provides invaluable sports viewership data) also does this. It makes it so hard to find dates for events, having to calculate what “two weeks ago” actually means. Not sure there’s anything to be done about that particular content management service, I just wanted to note my relatively minor objection to it.
On to this week’s issue. On the film side, rated-R comedies have struggled in theaters, but guess what? They struggle on streaming, too.
Plus, I’ll look at Netflix’s poor week on the charts, The Boys strong second week (along with another Prime Video superhero continuing to put up strong numbers), good news for Apple TV(+) on one hand, bad news for Apple TV on another, what buzzy studio struggles to make streaming hits, underperforming reality shows, another mega Taylor Sheridan hit show (but it’s not on streaming!), the DC vs. Marvel comic book sales battle, all the flops, bombs and misses, and a whole lot more.
But we start with TV, and HBO’s strong start to 2026. 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 Apr 13th to Apr 19th 2026.
You can find a link to my terminology here.)
Television - HBO Started The Year Strong…And Isn’t Stopping
For all the talk about various streamers having bad starts to the year—and I basically mean all my writing so far this year —one streamer/company has impressed me: HBO. They ended December with an extremely buzzy show, kicked the year off with A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, then rode The Pitt’s fifteen-episode second season to weekly chart dominance, and now they are going right into Euphoria. That’s a strong run, so let’s talk about HBO shows, since one ended (The Pitt) and one just started (Euphoria) the week of this report.
Starting with the epic run for The Pitt, this show topped the Nielsen charts this week, in its fifteenth week of release:
Yep, The Pitt hit 23.1 million hours in the week of its finale. Now, a lot of folks saw Nielsen’s chart comparing season one to season two of The Pitt. Here’s that look (which includes the weeks The Pitt’s first season missed the charts):
I saw that chart lots of places. But what I didn’t see was an analysis of the biggest second seasons of all time on the Nielsen top ten charts! So here you go:
In my mind, this accomplishment is even more impressive.
It’s bigger than other mega-hit shows like Wednesday, Squid Game, The Mandalorian, Bridgerton, and more. Plus, The Pitt is just 4.8 million hours shy of Landman’s second season. Given how well it did this week, I bet it makes the Nielsen charts next week, and that means it will almost assuredly displace Landman as the biggest second season according to the Nielsen top ten charts since 2020. Yes, The Pitt has a lot more episodes than any of those shows, but in this case, that’s a feature, not a bug.
What a monster show.
Other data backs this up. Samba TV had The Pitt as the top show on streaming for the last few weeks. They also put out that the finale was up 87% from season one and 13% from the start of season two, for a whopping 5.1 million households in its first six days. Those are big, big numbers. It also did really well on Luminate, with season one and season two making those charts for the last several weeks.
And yes, we got the obligatory HBO datecdote. The Pitt finished with 9.7 million viewers in its first three days, making it the biggest show since the second half of 2025 in terms of viewers for one episode in three days. (HBO changed metrics after The Last of Us, changing from “first day” viewership to “first three days”. I’m going to try to get some historical data to expand this comparison in a future issue.)
And a new HBO show made the Nielsen charts as well, the aforementioned Euphoria in third place.
This show remains very popular, even with its gigantic gaps between seasons. It debuted in 2019…but has only put out three seasons since then. Huh. I don’t agree with that strategy, but in this rare case, it’s not hurting the viewership. Euphoria is already climbing the Samba TV charts, up to second place (see above), and this week it finally made the Nielsen charts with 9.3 million hours. (The previous season missed the acquired charts.) It also got the HBO datecdote treatment, with 8.5 million viewers for the premiere in three days. Episode two did 8.5 million viewers, too, according to HBO.
Now, Euphoria will have trouble catching The Pitt’s total performance, since this season will only have eight episodes, and we’ll see how long it lasts on both the Samba TV and Nielsen charts. (It won’t surprise me if it takes the first place sport on Samba TV.) Overall, though, this show is another hit for HBO right off the back of The Pitt’s elite run.
This is an argument for weekly releases and plus-sized episode orders, since it makes the content spend more efficient. HBO doesn’t put as many shows on the Nielsen charts as Netflix, but they keep their shows on the charts for much longer. That means fewer shows for the same top performance, and honestly, as my strategy column this week implied, I wonder how long Netflix can avoid switching to this.
Quick Notes on TV
Reading Bloomberg this week, Lucas Shaw reported that no Netflix TV series made the top ten overall charts this week. And…yeah, he’s right. Excellent catch! Here’s my “Nielsen top 30” overall, and indeed, no Netflix-only show makes the top 10 (but one film did).
What’s driving this? Well, Netflix’s TV shows are now short in terms of average run time per episode and short in terms of total episodes per season. Four weeks back, Netflix released Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen, which only had eight episodes. Last week, Netflix put out Big Mistakes, a half-hour show with only eight episodes, and this week, they rolled out Beef. While the new season is longer than the first season of Beef—which came out wayyyyy back in 2023—at 35-minute long episodes, this one is still only 43-minutes-per-episode long and only has eight episodes. In other words, as Netflix episode orders shrink—remember when 13 episodes were standard?—customers finish the shows faster and hence, the series don’t last as long on the charts. The current season of Beef only had 8.3 million hours according to Nielsen, down from 16.0 million for the first season. Samba TV has similarly bad numbers, only one week on those charts.
After Beef, very few new releases made the viewership charts I track. Looking at last week’s shows, The Boys had 15 million hours in its second week, so that show is on track to put up huge numbers in its last season. It’s done well on Samba TV too, making it three weeks, though its Luminate numbers are fairly light. Related, Invincible continues to do well on Nielsen, and even showed up on Samba TV and Luminate again. Here’s how The Boys and Invincible compare to each other:
Love on the Spectrum U.S. made it for a third week on the Nielsen charts, but it will likely fall off the Nielsen charts next week after a three-week run. It did fall off Luminate. Meanwhile, Temptation Island, the Netflix reboot, made the Nielsen charts in its second week after missing last week with 7.8 million hours. After that, a number of Netflix shows fell off the charts, including Big Mistake, Trust Me: The False Prophet and XO, Kitty. To follow on the point from above, the short episode counts may be why Netflix had a relatively down week according to the Nielsen charts. I probably would have spread out shows like Bridgerton, The Lincoln Lawyer and The Night Agent a bit more earlier this year.
A couple of Netflix shows fell off after longer-ish (for them) runs, including Virgin River (five weeks) and Beauty in Black (four weeks):
The Madison fell off the Nielsen charts this week, so Paramount+ didn’t make the top ten. It fell off Luminate, too, and had previously fallen out of the Samba TV top ten. So this is a down week, and they’ll have to wait until Dutton Ranch can come to save them. (I expect that one does well.) They also have a big hit on linear TV, which I cover below. Overall, though, this strong Sheridan run begs the question I can’t help but keep bringing up: why did Paramount let him leave?!?!? Worse, their plan seems to be to replace him with “buzzy” TV shows, like this A24 acquisition from October, a producer with an extremely mixed track record.
Peacock’s The Miniature Wife made the Nielsen charts at a low 5.9 million in its second week. That’s not great at all, and this show likely had expensive special effects to pull off the visual gags. It made Luminate for a second week as well, but then fell off those charts too. Listen, it’s good that it has at least made Nielsen—it’s in the top ten—but for a binge-released show, being under 10 million hours is still very, very low.
Apple TV+ continued to get some good news (for them, mind you) as Your Friends and Neighbors made the Nielsen charts this week, so it’s now made all three viewership charts. (I analyzed how well it did on the debut charts in 2024 here.) It also stayed on the Samba TV charts, whereas Shrinking fell off after one week.
The acquired Nielsen charts stayed relatively stable, with Survivor making it three weeks at just below 10 million hours. I’m now a bit curious how long this one lasts on these charts.
Our “Miss of the Week” has to go to (yet another) Apple TV show, Margo’s Got Money Troubles, which stars Elle Fanning, Nick Offerman, Michelle Pfeiffer, Nicole Kidman and Greg Kinnear. Also, it’s from A24! And legendary TV show creator David E Kelley! The only data point that I saw for Margo’s Got Money Troubles was a Samba TV datecdote saying that the first episode had 1.2 million households, but there was no timeframe, so I can’t explain what this performance means, since we have no context. It has an okay 7.2 on IMDb, but only 5K reviews. Based on numerous articles I’ve read recently, *everyone* around town is desperate/hungry for A24’s TV shows, but based on their track record, I can’t really figure out why. Their biggest hit shows to date are Euphoria, which is doing well, but it’s taken them forever to get a third season of it out (and I’d give more credit to HBO/Zendaya than A24, but still, a hit is a hit), and Beef, which, as I wrote I wrote about above, is way, way down from its first season and also took three years to get a second season out.
On Luminate, the second season of Netflix’s Traitors rip-off, er, fast follow, Million Dollar Secret, and Peacock’s Love Island: Beyond the Villa made the Luminate charts, but they didn’t grab enough viewership to save them from being “misses”. Million Dollar Secret had 4.1 million and 4.9 million hours, while Love Island: Beyond the Villa had 3.1 million and 4.1 million. For both shows, those low numbers might be just enough to say that neither show is an outright miss—since they’re both unscripted and, hopefully, cheap to produce—but it depends on the budget.2 At least those two reality shows made a viewership chart! Two other reality shows were “Dogs Not Barking” (my term for any show or film that doesn’t make any of the ratings charts that I track, find an explainer here): Prime Video’s American Gladiators reboot and the third season of Hulu’s Vanderpump Villa. I debated giving the American Gladiators reboot the “Miss of the Week” given its IP, but Margo looked much more expensive. In “shows switching streamers” news, two formerly BET+ shows from Tyler Perry, The Oval and Divorced Sistas, headed to Paramount+, but neither charted. Same goes for Tubi’s UK-import, Big Mood. Lastly, MGM+’s From came out on 19-Apr, but that show is in a streaming viewership dead zone, as that service isn’t included on the streaming charts, but Amazon has said it does well.
Looking at sports docu-series, Netflix’s latest sports docu-series, Full Swing, on its fourth season, didn’t chart, but its latest season was just four episodes long. Neither did Netflix’s Ronaldinho: The One and Only. Paramount+’s You Don’t Know Where I’m From, Dawg, a five-part docu-series on Clint Dempsey, also failed to launch. In general, looking at this spring, I think the streamers are (finally) starting to pull back from this genre. Netflix, in particular, has released way fewer sports docu-series.
As I’m occasionally doing now, on busy weeks, I highlight all the foreign-language shows that don’t make the charts, all from Netflix, including Someone Has to Know from Chile, Made with Love from Indonesia, Crooks from Germany, The Law According to Lidia Poet from Italy, Fake Profile from Colombia (this one made the charts in 2023!) and Alpha Males from Spain.
I can confirm all of last week’s misses, most notably HBO Max’s Hacks, Disney+’s Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord and Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair, and Netflix’s At Home with the Furys. The Testaments also fell off the Luminate charts after only two weeks, and hasn’t made Nielsen or Samba TV.
Film - The Fall of the R-Rated Comedy?
Two R-rated comedies failed to dethrone Netflix’s horror flick, Thrash, from the top spot on the Nielsen film charts this week:
Given that horror films underperform on streaming—It’s not like Thrash was huge either, with just two weeks at ten million hours; especially for Netflix films, that’s not great—then it’s worth asking what this says about R comedies!
The bigger of the two comedies is Balls Up, a Peter Farrelly comedy that went straight-to-streaming on Prime Video, despite boasting some big name acting talent in Mark Wahlberg and Paul Walter Hauser. It had only 7.2 million hours in its opening week, and has an atrocious 4.7 IMDb score on 11K reviews.
Looking at past films, Prime Video has had success with the genre with Eddie Murphy’s Coming 2 America (23.6 million hours) sequel. But overall the genre struggles, like the Borat sequel which only had 9.5 million hours and Rick Stanicky (also from Peter Farrelly) with had 8.3 million hours. These films are clearly in a category below their other top films, such as Red One.
Netflix’s new film Roommates did even worse, with 5.2 million hours on Nielsen and even fewer IMDb reviews. (It has a 5.7 on 7.1K reviews.) There were some accusations of nepotism, since Adam Sandler’s daughter, Eddie Murphy’s daughter, Laura Dern’s daughter, Martin Scorsese’s daughter, and Chris Rock’s daughters are all in it. This is the second film Netflix has made featuring Sadie Sandler, so they must think she has it, but so far, her films have failed to put up good numbers. Of course, her dad’s films continue to do well, and this might be part of the price of his overall deal with Netflix, essentially.
I’ve read the takes that comedies no longer work in theaters, and folks speculating that they migrated to streaming instead. Well, they don’t really do terrific numbers on streaming either. Again, outside of reboots and sequels, they don’t really launch.
This is actually the case for theaters. To me, this genre could have the same ROI potential as horror films (in America, not globally). That means if you make cheap comedies paired with smart marketing campaigns, studios could get $10 to $30 million openings. That will help the streaming viewership later on.
Quick Notes on Film
Crime 101 only ended up lasting two weeks on the Samba TV charts, but made it to three weeks on Nielsen. Thrash also only lasted two weeks on the Samba TV charts. It had over 10.3 million hours in its second week on Nielsen. Both films did “fine” on streaming, but weren’t hits.
Zootopia 2 had a long run going on Nielsen, up to six weeks. That’s not KPop Demon Hunters (see next) but still good.
Well, it’s official: KPop Demon Hunters bested Encanto in terms of total hours viewed in its first year of release on the Nielsen charts, adding 3.3 million hours this week to its total.
The film ‘Miss of the Week” goes to...theaters/hard-R comedies’ theatrical ambitions. I wrote about both Roommates and Balls Up up above.
As for films, three documentaries made the Luminate charts but at a low number, starting with Netflix’s nature doc, A Gorilla Story: Told by David Attenborough, at 1.4 million, Hulu’s true crime doc, #SKYKING, at 1.2 and 1.5 million, and Prime Video’s sports doc/biopic, Jerry West: The Logo, at 1.6 million. (After Winning Time did Jerry West dirty, I’m glad Kenya Barris made this doc.) These low numbers just confirm that these titles flop, though I’m guessing none of them were too expensive.
I’d note that Dust Bunny, a fantasy action film from Lionsgate that, I won’t lie, sounds kind of cool (a hitman fights a monster) made some interest charts.
The DNBs include Tubi’s low budget horror film, Hive, starring Xochitl Gomez, Netflix’s doc about a singer-songwriter, Noah Kahan: Out of Body, their latest sports doc in the Untold series, Untold: Jail Blazers, their latest standup special, Trevor Noah: Joy in the Trenches, and Peacock’s WWE biopic, The Heartbreak Kid: Becoming Shawn Michaels missed too. On the foreign film charts, globally, five Indian films, including one original, Toaster, and four non-originals, Ustaad Bhagat Singh, Youth, Tu Yaa Main, and Do Deewane Seher Mein, made the global charts but didn’t chart in the US.
Anecdata of the Week - DC Beats Marvel in Comic Book Sales
Fun fact for my comic book fans out there: DC has bested Marvel for two quarters in a row:
DC had 34.7% of the direct comic book sales market while Marvel had 29.4%, which, I’ll be honest, was lower for both companies than I expected, but the next highest is Image Comics at 11.8% and no one else is above 5%.
Linear Ratings of the Week - Taylor Sheridan Does it Again
I normally don’t mention linear shows in the Streaming Ratings Report, but I mentioned CBS’ Marshals opening to 9.5 million live viewers a few weeks back because I was already talking about Taylor Sheridan.
Well, after 28 days, the show’s first episode viewership has grown to 26.5 million viewers. According to Nielsen, CBS has six of the top 20 most-watched series among all broadcast and streaming competition” and Marshals is just second to Stranger Things since the start of the year.
Honestly, I kinda love this new look and hope CBS keeps putting it out.
Sports Ratings of the Week - A Whole Bunch of Sports: NCAA Tourneys, the Masters and the WNBA
We’ve got lots of sports viewership data for the two weeks we’re covering for this report.3
First off, both the men’s NCAA final and the women’s NCAA final were both up year-over-year. Yes, some of this growth is due to a measurement change—specifically Nielsen’s change to the “Big Data+” methodology—but the two tournaments have been gaining interest for a few years now.
The Women’s NCAA final (featuring UCLA dominating Texas and South Carolina) averaged 9.9 million viewers, up 16% from the year before, but slightly down from 2023 (and way down from 2024’s huge ratings of 18.9 million). The women’s Final Four games were up 33% from the year before to 5.2 million average viewers.
The Men’s NCAA Final Four averaged 18.3 million viewers, up from 18.1 million. With Nielsen’s new Big Data panel, this should be considered a bit of a slide. But the match aired on TNT, not CBS, which shows strong resiliency for a non-broadcast game. Overall, the Men’s Final Four games averaged 14.2 million viewers, a huge number, but down 8% from last year. The Men’s NCAA basketball tournament, as a whole, averaged 10.9 million viewers, up 7%, the second-highest mark all time.
Even without Caitlin Clark, women’s basketball continues to post very strong ratings. Yeah, the big data panel measurement change boosted all sports, but the Women’s NCAA tournament has seen a big bump overall. Sure enough, the WNBA draft averaged 1.5 million viewers, up 250K from the year before. (But, like the final, down from the peak of 2.5 million in 2024.)
The Masters on CBS averaged 13.9 million viewers. Previous Masters tournaments had much higher viewership—especially during peak Tiger Woods-era—but this is the best viewership since 2015. And, again, a huge number.
There’s been a lot of ink spilled about all the media companies’ focus on live sports. With viewership like this, that’s why.
Coming Soon!
Next issue, the streamers will try to rebound from this low week. Will the second season of Netflix’s Running Point maintain the viewership of the first season? Will Apple TV’s Criminal Record finally make the charts? Can CoComelon Lane regain that franchise’s lost lustre? All that, plus HBO’s new Richard Gadd drama, Half Man, three animated shows, a Zach Galifianakis gardening show, and more. Oh, and a Charlize Theron action thriller about a rock climber being hunted in Australia.
At the end of the month, the number of new TV shows and films coming to streaming slows way down (something I plan on exploring more, especially since it’s just a month before Emmy nominations voting ends), but there’s always lots to talk about, like a new Apple horror comedy, Widow’s Bay, Netflix’s big new action show, the Man of Fire reboot starring Yahya Abdul-Masteen, and a new animated kids film, Swapped, which if off to a big start globally. Same goes for Netflix’s Roast of Kevin Hart.
That, and the second most expensive show of all time returns to Prime Video.
Long term, we’ve got some fun kids media news. First, Paddington’s fourth film is officially a go, and I’m pumped. These movies are awesome, so my kids and I can’t wait for more. (And can we just make all of them available on streaming? Paddington 2 wasn’t available for a while...) Next, Amazon MGM is doing a live-action Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, and I have no idea what to think about that bold call.
Finally, in note movie/TV show news, a rarity for this section of the report, Disney/Epic Games are working on an “Arc Raiders”-like Disney extraction shooter, to which I’m like, “Huh.” Mainly, I hope they focus on quality. Many a video game has failed because it expects the IP to do the work instead of a quality gameplay loop. I’m especially worried about the development timeline, since they hope to get the game out by November. Sure enough, allegedly, insiders are already concerned about the game’s quality.
Appendix
I also deliberately put commas outside of quotation marks that aren’t dialogue. That’s a truly idiosyncratic grammar take, but one that I think makes way, way more sense.
Again, I support writers making idiosyncratic, but deliberate, writing choices.
I’ll probably include them both as “honorable mentions” for misses in the first half of the year later this summer.
As a reminder, yeah, this is a streaming ratings report, but I like to keep an eye on the streaming/linear sports viewership for crucial context.