Ayo Edebiri and Jeremy Allen White in The Bear’s final season.
Courtesy of FX
Beyond its Emmy wins, and all the discourse around whether the show is actually a comedy, and all the other discourse about it, The Bear has been a bona fide hit for FX and Hulu. Its second, third and fourth seasons spent a collective 15 weeks in the top 10 streaming charts — pretty solid runs for a binge-release series. Seasons 2 and 3 both logged weeks with more than a billion minutes of watch time, according to Nielsen.
The final season … not so much. The Bear started with 587 million minutes of viewing for season 5’s premiere week of June 22-28, of which about 446 million (76 percent) was for the eight new episodes that debuted June 25 (Nielsen counts viewing of all available episodes). That’s not bad, really, but it’s down by 36 percent from the opening week of season 4 last year.
The Bear’s premiere week was a pretty busy one — six shows and movies on the streaming charts had more than a billion viewing minutes, and the World Cup was occupying a bunch of people’s time on regular TV (and Peacock). But there were five billion-minute shows for The Bear’s premiere week last year (albeit no world-spanning sports event), so there’s probably a more mundane explanation for the decline.
Simply put, it’s the normal life cycle of a TV show. Audiences drift away over time, and particularly with streaming, we’re conditioned to look for the shiny new thing (unless it’s the 47th comfort watch of a long-running network show with 300-plus episodes).
I’m planning to focus on The Bear some more for this weekend’s post, so that’s all I’ll say for now. Onto the weekly charts …
Overall top 10, June 22-28
Show/Movie | Streamer(s) | Minutes viewed in millions | Episode count |
I Will Find You* | Netflix | 2,484 | 8 |
Love Island USA* | Peacock/Disney+/Paramount+ | 1,966 | 271 |
The Last Ship** | Netflix | 1,232 | 56 |
Avatar: The Last Airbender (2024)*** | Netflix | 1,065 | 15 |
Avatar: Fire and Ash*** | Disney+ | 1,009 | 1 |
Bluey | Disney+ | 1,005 | 154 |
House of the Dragon | HBO Max | 931 | 20 |
The Big Bang Theory | HBO Max | 931 | 281 |
Grey's Anatomy | Hulu/Netflix | 860 | 467 |
Voicemails for Isabelle | Netflix | 748 | 1 |
*That’s two straight weeks as the overall No. 1 for I Will Find You, which was up by about 35 percent week to week. Love Island, meanwhile, had its highest weekly total ever.
**Netflix Effect in effect here: The former TNT show starring Eric Dane was added to the service June 22.
***😏 at these two being right next to one another. The Last Airbender is Netflix’s live-action adaptation of the great Nickelodeon animated show (which is coming back to life with a new spinoff series), and Fire and Ash is the third of James Cameron’s movies.