In our Lockwood and Co — season 2 update we assess the chances of a renewal. It’s not looking good…
A month ago, we were pleased with the early numbers for Lockwood and Co — not stellar, but solid. Now we’ve had a few weeks and we can see how the show performed over its first few weeks at Netflix. We’ve also got the most recent Nielsen numbers to add into the mix. Spoiler alert — it’s mostly not encouraging.
Do people like Lockwood and Co?
We certainly found a lot to like in Joe Cornish’s adaptation of the first two Jonathan Stroud novels. If we check Rotten Tomatoes (perhaps not completely representative), we see the ratings as of today are: 92% critics and 94% audience. What we don’t have is any sense of how many this equates to. Casting our net wider, IMDB rates the series at 7.4 / 10. We do have a breakdown and this is from over 15,000 voters.
We thought we might compare it to The Irregulars a 2021 UK set YA supernatural show, cancelled by Netflix after one season and what seemed to be decent viewing figures. Here the audience was far less positive: Rotten Tomatoes gave it 80% critics but a dire 50% audience rating; IMDB manages 6.0 / 10 with around 16,000 votes.
Are people watching it?
The answer is yes, but not enough. It vanished from the Netflix Top 10 weekly chart after only three weeks, far from a positive sign. The recently released Nielsens for US viewing January 23-29 have the show at #6 with 450 million minutes viewed on opening week. This is one position below Wednesday still riding high after months (as an aside, one week 14 Wednesday is still in the weekly Top 10 for Netflix).
In other words it came, it saw but it didn’t seem to conquer.
Is there scope for further seasons?
The Jonathan Stroud Lockwood and Co series consists of five books. The first two were adapted for season 1, so we would like to see seasons 2 and 3. At this point the numbers aren’t compelling, so it rests with Netflix to take a strategic punt by looking at their (crowded) YA / Supernatural portfolio. We’ll be keeping our eyes very much open.