Streaming top 10s: When a chart position is within 'Striking Distance'

The funniest thing about Nielsen’s streaming charts is usually the top 10 movies. The bar for making the top 10 is generally lower than for series, for one thing: It might take 350 million minutes or so of watch time for an original show to crack the charts, and more than that for a library show. But for movies, 10th place is often under 200 million minutes, meaning the chance that one or two extremely random titles pop up there that much higher, often by virtue of being recently added to Netflix and showing up in the “New on” strip on people’s home screens.

And folks, do we have some silliness in the latest charts, which cover the week of May 4-10. I’m spoiling the weirdest/funniest one with the headline and photo: the 1993 thriller Striking Distance, starring Bruce Willis and Sarah Jessica Parker. Oddly enough, that was not a new addition to Netflix in early May. Best I can tell, it’s been available there since at least early April.

The top of the series chart has an oddity too, though a more easily explained one. No. 1 overall for the week was La Brea, the “giant sinkhole opens up in the middle of L.A. and sends our protagonist into the Hollow World” series that ran for three seasons on NBC earlier this decade. It was added to Netflix May 1 (it’s also on Peacock) and charted that week before moving up to No. 1 overall. It got a good Netflix bump, but nowhere near Suits-level (that kind of sustained crazy-high run for a library show seems very unlikely to happen again in the near future).

The streaming tallies for May 4-10 are below. The viewing totals for series are for every available episode, not just currently running seasons. As a reminder, you’ll be getting more complete streaming reports on Thursday evenings as part of the new schedule for The Data Stream. Enjoy the oddness of some of these shows and movies.

*First time this season above a billion viewing minutes for The Boys.

**It’s pretty rare to have two original streaming movies, which Swapped and Remarkably Bright Creatures both are, make the overall top 10 in the same week.

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*The hugely expensive Citadel had three years between seasons. This is the best showing it’s had on the Nielsen charts (which is not great, given the hugely expensive part).

**The Pitt is still hanging around, three weeks after its season ended. That’s also somewhat rare.

*These totals include episodes newly added to Hulu after they air on their respective networks, though based on some number-crunching I did for Grey’s Anatomy, the back catalog accounts for most of the viewing time.

*I hope any moms who watched Mother’s Day on Mother’s Day did so by choice and weren’t subjected to it as a “gift” from their families.

**Very big “couple at Blockbuster in 1994 couldn’t decide on one movie to rent and got them both” energy in the 9 and 10 spots here.

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