The Last Kingdom owns the Nielsen Top 10 in the latest ratings — we dig a little deeper
It’s an easy victory for The Last Kingdom, and though last week we predicted something different:
A look at the Netflix data for 14-20 March suggests Good Girls will take over from The Last Kingdom, while Inventing Anna still rides strong. Food themed shows have two entries (Bad Vegan: Fame. Fraud. Fugitives.: Limited Series and Is It Cake?), so if we add in Upload and Mrs Maisel that’s a lot to look forward to
We’ve dug a little deeper, and (while apologising for last week’s oversight) have an explanation. First let’s get the actual numbers.
The Nielsen data for 14-20 March
This is the published, historic data for the US — we add the columns marked ‘*’.
| Rank | Streamer | Series | #Episodes | Ep length (mins)* | Total Minutes (Millions) | Episode Watches* |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Netflix | The Last Kingdom | 46 | 55 | 1,317 | 23,945,455 |
| 2 | Netflix | Bad Vegan: Fame. Fraud. Fugitives. | 4 | 52 | 609 | 11,711,538 |
| 3 | Netflix | Inventing Anna | 9 | 67 | 598 | 8,925,373 |
| 4 | Netflix | Pieces Of Her | 8 | 50 | 583 | 11,660,000 |
| 5 | Amazon | The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel | 34 | 60 | 482 | 8,033,333 |
| 6 | Netflix | Is It Cake? | 8 | 38 | 477 | 12,552,632 |
| 7 | Netflix | Life After Death With Tyler Henry | 9 | 42 | 457 | 10,880,952 |
| 8 | Netflix | Love Is Blind | 25 | 60 | 416 | 6,933,333 |
| 9 | Amazon | Upload | 17 | 30 | 359 | 11,966,667 |
| 10 | Netflix | Ozark | 37 | 60 | 304 | 5,066,667 |
The Last Kingdom owns the Top 10
The Last Kingdom isn’t just top, it attracted double the audience viewing of second placed Bad Vegan. Good news for fans of Bernard Cornwell novel inspired series, but what happened to Good Girls?
The answer is to look closer at what the Nielsen table actually shows — this is the table of original streaming content. Selecting the next tab (acquired shows) brings up titles such as NCIS and Good Girls. It just shows how careful you need to be trying to compare numbers from different sources! We’re very much focussed on original content in these rating articles, so we’ll try to be more careful next time!
What else happened?
We were pretty much spot on with our prediction for mos of the rest of the Top 10, including Is it Cake?, though did wonder if Upload might do better. Some very similar episode watch figures across #2 – #9, with five shows attracting 10-12 million episode watches.
What are we looking out for next time?
The #1 show next week will be Bridgerton, thanks to season 2 (as we discussed here) and will dominate for a while. We’re looking at the next few positions, and it’s about which shows drop slower than others. Upload and Ozark may well both drop out, whatever happens we’ll bring our unique take on the Nielsen table.
Elsewhere
Amazon has rebranded its IMDb TV as Amazon Freevee — this is an advertising supported option, and Amazon are now branding it closer. They also announced a new show (Troppo) and we wonder how long it will be before we see Freevee in the Top 10. Probably not soon, but don’t forget this is another layer of streaming and others are also looking at advertising (Disney and ITVX spring to mind). As ever we’re keeping an eye on these industry trends.