The latest Nielsens for the end of January show Bridgerton leads the way (still) — but is that the whole story?
The Nielsen US streaming figures for January 25-31 are out, and show Bridgerton leads the pack still in the top slot (but not by as much as other weeks). As we pointed out last week, you get a different picture if you take the number of episodes in a series into account. This week we’ve had the CultBox data scientists toil away and they also factored in the typical length of each episode, and that gives a very different story altogether as you’ll see.
The data (co Nielsen)
Columns with ‘*’ are added by CultBox.
| Rank | Streamer | Series | # Episodes | Ep length (mins)* | Total Minutes (Millions) | Season Watches* |
| 1 | Netflix | Bridgerton | 8 | 60 | 936 | 1,950,000 |
| 2 | Netflix | Fate: The Winx Saga | 6 | 50 | 918 | 3,060,000 |
| 3 | Netflix | Cobra Kai | 30 | 30 | 568 | 631,111 |
| 4 | Netflix | Blown Away | 20 | 25 | 438 | 876,000 |
| 5 | Disney+ | Wandavision | 4 | 40 | 431 | 2,693,750 |
| 6 | Netflix | The Crown | 40 | 60 | 338 | 140,833 |
| 7 | Netflix | Night Stalker: The Hunt For A Serial Killer | 4 | 40 | 321 | 2,006,250 |
| 8 | Netflix | Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous | 16 | 25 | 319 | 797,500 |
| 9 | Netflix | Longmire | 63 | 60 | 304 | 80,423 |
| 10 | Netflix | The Great British Baking Show | 65 | 75 | 292 | 59,897 |
So, Bridgerton leads just ahead of Fate: The Winx Saga, the latter fully justifying its renewal. WandaVision is still the sole representative from Disney+, and The Crown keeps on hitting the charts. It’s also a random return for The Great British Baking Show (aka The Bake Off). Now let’s step back a little.
We don’t have the real data, but let’s look at how long an episode is and how many episodes make a season. If you do some basic division, it’s a very different story. Remember this is a rough and ready model, and for a show still being screened WandaVision is not as good a representation of season watching as for others. Even so, we have a massive nearly two million watches for the whole of Bridgerton in a week, but second place Fate: The Winx Saga has fewer, shorter episodes, and we make it over three million season watches in a week (some people may have watched twice!).
On this analysis, with place WandaVision (and we’re still reacting to last week’s reveal) in second place in terms of people watching the then total of four episodes (we’ve just had episode eight, one more to go). We think this is interesting, and will track future figures the same way. For now we expect Bridgerton to struggle to retain top slot next week, but we’re intrigued to see what else happens.