Jason Sudeikis and Hannah Waddingham in the season 4 premiere of Ted Lasso.
Courtesy Apple TV
Normally, this would be the third newsletter you’re receiving this week, following the Monday calendar and weekly network and cable ratings on Wednesday. But Nielsen, the source of both of those ratings charts, hasn’t yet released last week’s on-air numbers due to, I’m told, needing to re-validate some data before it’s publicly released.
As far as I know, that stuff will come tomorrow. When/if it does, I’ll send out a newsletter with those rankings Friday evening — just in time for all you U.S.-based subscribers to shut down your email for Labor Day weekend.
Anyway: I’ve talked about the late-summer blahs several times lately, and the streaming charts for Aug. 3-9 reflect it. The Big Bang Theory was the overall No. 1 for the third week in a row, and it was the only show or movie to draw a billion minutes or more of viewing time.
One exception: Ted Lasso came back in a big way on Apple TV. It had been more than three years since the show last aired. It wasn’t really a surprise that Apple and studio Warner Bros. TV got all the pieces in place to make a fourth season — it’s one of Apple’s biggest shows ever and has won a bunch of Emmys — but it was reasonable to wonder if people would still care as much about the show after that long a gap between seasons.
At least for Ted’s premiere week, the answer was a big ol’ yes. It had 866 million minutes of watch time, about 312 million of which (36 percent) were for the single new episode that debuted Aug. 5. The 866 million is by a long way the best premiere week the show has had, and it’s up by more than 60 percent from the season 3 premiere in 2023.
Ted Lasso finished fourth overall and will likely be hanging around the top 10 for a couple of months. So be prepared.
Here are the weekly Nielsen charts for Aug. 3-9.