Weekly ratings: 'The Boroughs' optics continue to be bad for Netflix

OK, so it’s not like Netflix didn’t know how many people were watching The Boroughs when the streamer canceled the show, and yes, it was a fairly expensive series. But thanks to the four-week time lag Nielsen puts on its streaming ratings, the cancellation is getting harder to defend.

Put simply: The Boroughs looks like a hit. In its first two weeks, the show had almost 3 billion minutes of viewing time in the U.S., which translates to 7.84 million streaming views by the industry-standard definition (total watch time divided by run time, which in this case is 375 minutes). It was No. 1 overall in Nielsen’s charts for May 25-31, as you’ll see below.

Netflix hasn’t said much about the cancellation, but if I can speculate, I’d bet that The Boroughs didn’t get the right kind of viewers — i.e., maybe it didn’t drive many new subscriptions or result in viewers then spending a ton more time on other Netflix shows. The 7.84 million views in the U.S. are a little more than half of what Netflix reported worldwide for the show’s first two weeks (15.1 million, albeit with a different way of measuring), and the largest group of viewers here were over 50 years old, according to Nielsen.

In other words — and again, this is just me speculating — The Boroughs may be a victim of the kind of demographic-driven (or acquisition-driven, or whatever) kind of thinking that felled any number of pre-streaming era network shows that didn’t have enough younger viewers. You know, the kind of thing that streaming promised would become a thing of the past. And so one we have one more data point that streaming is becoming more like traditional TV in all but the delivery method.

As for last week’s on-air ratings — which are coming a day later than usual because of the Juneteenth holiday — it’s a whole lot of World Cup. Like, “just about all of the primetime top 10 and full-day top 20.”

A few other TV news bits before the charts:

• DC and Warner Bros. Animation are making an animated series based on the best-selling comic book Absolute Batman, in which Bruce Wayne is neither wealthy nor an orphan (he still has one living parent).

• The final season of The Bear premieres today. Critics and media weren’t given a screener of the finale beforehand, and of course no one would say in interviews what happened. So instead, my THR colleague Tony Maglio asked the show’s leads what doesn’t happen in the final episode.

• NBC has released its fall premiere dates.

On to the ratings charts. ⚽️ ⚽️ ⚽️

*As I did last week, I’m separating the Fox and Telemundo World Cup broadcasts here so you can compare them. Nielsen says the on-air Telemundo broadcast of Argentina/Algeria had 4.46 million viewers — which means Peacock and other streaming accounted for almost half the total audience. And that’s an NFL-esque audience for Mexico/South Korea if you combine the two telecasts.

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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.)

*Congrats to NBC Nightly News for being the only program on this chart without “World” in its title.

*Good start for this show, which builds a whole live-action world around a relatively minor Spider-Man iteration from Marvel comics and Nicolas Cage’s tertiary character in the Spider-Verse movies. Cage also stars in the live-action show.

**Not a bad number for The Four Seasons … unless you compare it to the first season premiere last year, which had 1.3 billion minutes of watch time.

*This Jon Hamm show has quietly been doing pretty well for Apple. It has made the top 10 originals four times this year, this one coming a week before its second-season finale.

**First time on the charts for The Testaments, and likely the last for its first season. The Handmaid’s Tale sequel had its season finale on May 27.

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