Weekly ratings: We are the World Cup

This weekend’s newsletter will probably be a deeper dive into the men’s World Cup, but as a preview, let me just do a quick bit of analysis of the viewer totals so far:

Holy crap.

As you’ll see below, whether in primetime or other parts of the day, World Cup games on Fox and Telemundo/Peacock were ridiculously far ahead of anything else on TV. They held eight of the top 10 primetime spots and 19 of the top 20 regardless of time of day. The cross-platform totals for the U.S. round of 32 game and Mexico’s round of 32 and round of 16 matches rival those of NFL playoff games. (Though it seems like weeks ago, the U.S. round of 16 match was on Monday, and thus not in the charts below.) With all three host countries now out of the competition, the numbers might go down some for the final rounds, but it has been an overwhelming success.

On the topic of overwhelming, Love Island USA’s second week overlapped with the start of the World Cup but was pretty much immune to it, while the rest of the streaming top 10s for June 8-14 weren’t. More on that below as well.

A couple TV news items before the numbers:

• We have a DelCo-verse: Julianne Nicholson will reprise her Mare of Easttown role (which earned her an Emmy) in season 2 of Task on HBO. Both shows come from creator Brad Ingelsby and are set in Delaware County, Pennsylvania.

• Connor Hines, the creator of FX’s Love Story, has signed an overall deal with Netflix and is writing a series called Jupiter Island, named after the extremely wealthy Florida barrier island that’s home to a bunch of pro golfers and celebrities. The logline mentions that a “mysterious outsider” will cause issues for “golf’s reigning power couple,” and that last phrase just made me laugh.

On to the ratings charts. ⚽️ ⚽️ ⚽️ ⚽️ ⚽️

*England’s dramatic 3-2 win over Mexico on July 5 had almost 45 million combined viewers — an insane number that is more than all but five NFL games last season (the Super Bowl, the two conference championship games and two Thanksgiving games). On Telemundo alone, it drew 10.12 million viewers, making it the biggest over-the-air broadcast in Spanish-language TV history in the U.S. Oh, and the U.S. game up above? 36.2 million viewers in English and Spanish. Both are in the 10 most-watched programs of the year so far.

**A bit of an upset in the Fourth of July specials category, where the Macy’s 4th of July Fireworks usually owns the night. ABC’s Bash was the first show to beat the Macy’s special on July 4 since 2010.

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(Note: Viewers for nightly newscasts are averages of their weeknight airings, including ones the networks retitle to game the Nielsen numbers but not including holidays. Weekend newscasts are noted by day.)

*More huge numbers: 28.37 million combined for Norway’s upset(?) of Brazil, 26.22 million for Argentina’s escape vs. Cape Verde and 21 million for Portugal’s win over Croatia. I don’t have a complete rundown of combined Telemundo and Peacock audiences from last week, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Colombia/Ghana or Germany/Paraguay were top 20-worthy as well.

*According to Nielsen, about 1.15 billion of Love Island’s 1.83 billion minutes for the week came from the six new episodes that streamed, and 515 million more were for earlier season 8 episodes. The show was massive last year, but through its first two weeks this time out, it’s up by 68 percent year to year.

**This is a Korean drama, and not the first one to make the charts this year. Squid Game and KPop Demon Hunters seemed to have created a much wider lane on Netflix and other streamers for shows from Korea.

*You might have seen this Bloomberg story (gift link) about Netflix’s season 2 problems, of which The Four Seasons is an example. Through three weeks, it’s off by about a third from the first season last year, based on the Nielsen numbers.

**Shrill ran from 2019-21 on Hulu, and it got Netflix Effected into the top 10 originals after it premiered there on June 8.

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