Sports!
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The industry is still talking about Netflix’s whole deal, which even its co-CEO Ted Sarandos said has stagnated some, at least in the United States. He said on the company’s quarterly earnings call Tuesday that “we need better execution” on Netflix’s U.S. series slate, and that incoming chief content officer Peter Rice (who starts next week) will be the one to bring the execution level up.
Rice is a respected executive, and he’ll presumably still have a big budget (something like $20 billion) to spend making shows and movies. But an instant change isn’t going to happen, just because of the nature of production: At least a dozen shows are scheduled to premiere on Netflix before the end of the year, and they all came from the previous “gourmet cheeseburger” regime of Bela Bajaria.
I’m not sure Netflix has ever used the word “broadcaster” in reference to itself, but that has been its guiding creative ethos for at least the past few years. It wants to be the primary source of entertainment for as many people as possible, which is pretty much the definition of broadcasting, regardless of the way it arrives on people’s screens. That meant more shows like The Night Agent and The Lincoln Lawyer — which are both solid shows made by people who know how to make episodic TV — and fewer swings like Orange Is the New Black and Mindhunter, to name two shows I really enjoyed from Netflix’s first few years.
But as Sarandos put it, that strategy resulted in a lot of doubles and triples and not many home runs the past few years. Local language series and movies are performing well in the places they originate (and several have been big worldwide too), but to a degree Netflix’s global strategy depends on having a Stranger Things- or Wednesday-level, monster English-language show every year or so. Neither of those shows had new episodes this year (Stranger Things had a few huge weeks in January, but its series finale premiered Dec. 31, 2025).
The thing with broadcasting is that it’s a nicely profitable business if you do it right, but it doesn’t lend itself to the current tech/capital expectation of huge growth every quarter. Rice might bring a few more big hits to Netflix in the next couple of years, but I don’t know how he and the two CEOs above him, Sarandos and Greg Peters, reconcile the fundamental tension between being a broadcaster and being a profit machine.
Onto the weekly charts: The top 10 network primetime shows, top 20 on all outlets at all times of day and top 15 shows not including news and sports (and from any time of day) are below.