Caleb McLaughlin, Natalia Dyer, Gaten Matarazzo and Finn Wolfhard
in the final season of Stranger Things.
Courtesy of Netflix
The streaming ratings from Nielsen arrived a day late this week, which is why I didn’t send the usual newsletter Thursday night. Here’s a link to the rankings I did for The Hollywood Reporter on Friday. Also, a more interesting set of numbers came from the ratings folks earlier in the week that I want to spend time on this weekend.
Nielsen released the most streamed shows and movies for the first half of 2026. The top of the list is pretty much what you’d expect: Stranger Things and The Pitt were the two biggest original series from January to June* in terms of total viewing time, and Bluey — which led the year-end charts in 2024 and 2025 — remains huge.
(*The dataset runs from Dec. 29, 2025-June 28, 2026 because Nielsen follows a Monday-Sunday calendar to calculate ratings. Since Jan. 1 fell on a Thursday this year, it also includes the final couple days of last year and ends on the last Sunday of June.)
Because the weekly streaming ratings only show the top 10, it’s hard to know how shows perform once they fall below that. And in the first half of the year, only three shows (Bluey, Grey’s Anatomy and The Big Bang Theory) made a top 10 list every week. It’s no surprise that The Pitt and Stranger Things got a great majority of their total viewing time during the weeks they were in the top 10 (94 percent and 84 percent), but farther down the lists, that percentage shrinks some. About 29 percent of The Lincoln Lawyer’s total watch time came in weeks where it missed the top 10; for Hulu’s Paradise, that was almost 40 percent. A couple library shows are in the top 20 for the half-year despite never making a weekly top 10.
The top shows and movies for the first half of the year are below.