Summer H. Howell as Carrie White.
Courtesy of Prime Video
As I started my first day of public high school, the place I’d dreamed about after a sheltered life under the thumb of my mother, and still grieving the death of my dad, I couldn’t help but wonder …
Oh wait. Wrong Carrie.
This Carrie is Carrie White. And Carrie, the Prime Video show based on Stephen King’s novel, was the most streamed show in the U.S. for its premiere week. No wonder Prime gave it a pretty fast season 2 renewal on Thursday, even if the eight-episode season covers the whole novel and ends with the infamous prom night.
Showrunner (and frequent King adapter) Mike Flanagan and the author, who’s an EP of the series, apparently have ideas for how to continue the story, and the big premiere numbers (Amazon also says Carrie reached No. 1 in 100 other territories in its first two weeks) suggest the audience is there.
Prime Video, by the way, is having a very good late summer and early fall. It’s had the No. 1 overall show in the Nielsen U.S. streaming rankings in six of the last eight weeks — four times for Reacher, once for the spinoff Neagley and now Carrie.
A couple other bits of news before the charts:
• NBC has picked up a full season — of 18 episodes, which counts as such in this network era — of its first-year show Line of Fire. It’s done reasonably well so far, with the first episode climbing to 14 million cross-platform viewers in the month since it premiered.
• The Penguin showrunner Lauren LeFranc has joined an in-development Poison Ivy series at HBO and DC Studios. Details are otherwise sketchy, though: It’s not clear yet if LeFranc will be writing or running the project as it moves ahead.
• Somehow, Glee is returning. And so is Lea Michele, probably.
This was also a weird announcement, by the way. Ryan Murphy has said several times over the past couple months that he’d been working on reviving the show, but the Disney+/Hulu press release announcing the series pickup literally said just this, before some bullet points about the original series:
DISNEY+ & HULU ORDER “GLEE” TO SERIES
GLEE
Disney+ and Hulu Series Order
Studio: 20th Television
That’s it. No mention of Murphy or co-creators Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan, or anyone at all. What that means in practical terms, probably, is that their contracts aren’t quite final and they’ll be named when Disney next has a piece of news to announce about the show. But it’s a very rare thing to see someone announce a series pickup with zero people officially on board.
The streaming top 10s in the United States for Oct. 5-11 are below.