'Stranger Things' is how big?

Good Friday morning/afternoon to you. My oldest kid graduated from middle school last night. I am truly grateful for all of you subscribing to and reading The Data Stream, but celebrating my daughter and her classmates was the priority so this newsletter’s coming to you a little later than usual.

But! I got some interesting cross-platform ratings data for the season yesterday, and that’s included below along with the regular weekly charts.

I also want to shout out this story by my Hollywood Reporter colleague James Hibberd. A data firm called Ampere Analysis put some numbers behind somethng that’s been an easily observable fact for a while: that the time between seasons of streaming shows has gotten much longer. According to their study, the gap between seasons for original streaming shows has doubled in the last decade: from an average of 10 months in 2016 to 21 months by last year.

The good news is that the pendulum may be swinging back. The Pitt has become shorthand for producing a streaming show on a network-like calendar — i.e., with less than a year between the end of a season and the start of the next one — but most streamers have gotten wise to the idea that it’s good business not to have viewers waiting forever to have their favorite shows return. My friend Lesley Goldberg noted in The Ankler that several shows have gotten what you could call soft renewals, at least opening writers rooms for new seasons before the official announcement.

On to the numbers, starting with the cross-platform rankings …

These charts measure viewing over 35 days after a show/episode premieres, a long time in TV terms. The concern with delayed-viewing ratings in the DVR age was whether people were actually watching the ads in a given show, and whether those were relevant after more than a couple days. With streaming, though, it’s likely that new ads can be cycled in even if the episode first aired three or four weeks earlier (and those ads are less likely to be skippable).

For the network shows on this list, somewhere between 20 percent and about half of the 35-day total comes from streaming, and most of that happens in the first 10 days or so after an initial airing. I haven’t seen enough data for viewing patterns of streaming-only shows to have much confidence about when viewers watch — but if you compare some 28-day ratings released earlier in the season to what’s below, it suggests that viewing is front-loaded too.

The numbers below are from Nielsen and cover the 2025-26 season from Sept. 14, 2025 to April 12, 2026, the last week for which 35-day figures are available.

*The final season of Stranger Things being huge isn’t a surprise, but His & Hers is, to me at least. My experience of course is not representative, but I didn’t see or hear a lot of talk about it after it premiered in January.

**Taylor Sheridan seems to know a thing or two about getting a big audience to his shows.

***Season 2 The Pitt more than doubled its audience from last year, when it averaged 6.18 million viewers over 35 days.

Thirteen of the top 25 shows, regardless of platform, started on a broadcast network (not including sports, in which case Sunday/Monday Night Football would have both been in the top 10). These numbers came to me via CBS, which as you can see had the largest share of that group. Here are the next 12 broadcast shows in 35-day ratings.

*There’s an interesting split on this chart between first-year shows (Boston Blue, CIA, Scrubs, R.J. Decker, 911: Nashville) and ones that have been on for a very long time. 60 Minutes is older than I am, and SVU is going into a record-extending 28th season.

Now the weekly ratings:

*Both NBA conference finals are up a good bit from last year, and NBC Sports says streaming of its games on Peacock added an average of 2.1 million viewers per game through the first four. The other games of the East finals last week were on ESPN, which you’ll see below.

**The biggest same-day audience for a Survivor finale since the spring of 2020.

(Note: Viewers for nightly newscasts are averages of their weeknight airings, including ones the networks retitle to game the Nielsen numbers. Weekend ones are noted by day.)

*Colbert’s final Late Show drew its largest ever weeknight audience (a couple of post-NFL shows on Sundays over the years had bigger audiences). On Friday, Comics Unleashed moved into the 11:35 spot and had 1.1 million viewers — but CBS won’t really care about that because Byron Allen, who hosts and produces the show, is buying time from the network to air it.

**Georgie & Mandy ended its season with two episodes that had nearly identical audiences.

*Hello, Netflix effect: La Brea, which aired on NBC from 2021-24, was added to Netflix on May 1 and immediately joined the top 10.

**A series based on the novel that previously inspired the 2004 Denzel Washington/Tony Scott movie.

*Again, I’m including Euphoria in original series even if Nielsen considers it “acquired” from HBO.

**No.

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