The cast of The Big Bang Theory.
Courtesy of CBS
The Big Bang Theory has been on a bit of a heater in the past couple of months. The long-running comedy, which now streams exclusively on HBO Max, hasn’t fallen out of Nielsen’s top 10 library series since late October of 2025, but it’s been going especially strong since late June.
From mid-June to the start of August, Big Bang has averaged about 981 million viewing minutes per week, a 27 percent improvement over the first 24 weeks of the year (773 million). The show had its first billion-minute total in the week of July 13-19 and has stayed above that mark since.
Now, it’s the No. 1 overall title on streaming in the U.S. for the first time. The Big Bang Theory had 1.14 billion minutes for the week of July 27-Aug. 2, up slightly from the previous week’s 1.12 billion.
Any week over a billion minutes, even for a show with 281 episodes, is a good showing. But it must be said that this was also a pretty crappy week for original shows.
The top original series* of the week was Netflix’s short true-crime docuseries The Idaho Murders: College Nightmare at 864 million minutes of watch time. That’s the smallest total for a No. 1 original series in almost two years — since The Umbrella Academy led with 715 million minutes in August 2024. That’ll likely change next week, but it was a rough one for originals.
(*As determined by Nielsen, anyway. House of the Dragon, which is classified as a library show, was right above it at 884 million minutes, which still would have been the lowest weekly total for the No. 1 original this year, and probably a good bit further back.)
On the other hand, it was a pretty solid week for movies: Four of the top 10 had more than 500 million viewing minutes, which hasn’t happened since late June.
In conclusion, streaming is a land of contrasts. Here are the weekly Nielsen charts for July 27-Aug. 2.