Nielsen released its streaming ratings later than usual, since Americans celebrated Thanksgiving last Thursday, and Netflix's girl-meets-chess drama miniseries The Queen's Gambit topped the charts. As is traditional, most of the rest of the top 10 for the week was dominated by other Netflix programming, but Disney+'s The Mandalorian managed to muscle into the #3 spot.
The chart in question covers the week of October 26 through November 1. The Nielsen ratings for streaming measure cumulative minutes of viewing in the United States that were specifically done via a TV set, which means phones, iPads, and other mobile devices are left out of the rankings.
Even so, Queen's Gambit comfortably blew away the competition in the week after its initial release, scoring a total of 1.85 billion minutes watched in the Nielsen audience. (Fun fact: that's just under 3,520 years in real time. In one week, Americans spent three and a half millennia watching The Queen's Gambit.) The #2 show, The Office on Netflix, got a relatively tame 1.05 billion minutes across 192 episodes, as opposed to Queen's Gambit's 7.
The Office's high ranking highlights an interesting point about the Nielsens for this period overall: while The Mandalorian is a genuine hit, there's also apparently a lot of binge rewatching going on. Old shows on Netflix make up fully half the chart's top ten, with Schitt's Creek (#4), Grey's Anatomy (#6), Criminal Minds (#7), NCIS (#8), and Great British Baking Show (#10) all scoring respectable audience numbers. It's easy, if possibly unfair, to conclude that the entertainment drought created by the COVID-19 pandemic has reached a crisis point where people are actually deliberately hitting "play" on episodes of boomer murder series like Criminal Minds.
Also notable is that there's only one movie in the Nielsen's top 10, and it's the Netflix original romantic comedy Holidate, which premiered on October 28. It spans a year of the lives of Sloane (Emma Roberts) and Jackson (Luke Bracey), who both run into social problems with being single on major holidays, and thus enter into a dark pact to pretend they're dating during major calendar events. This breaking of the sacred covenant causes a demonic invasion that sinks Chicago into the Great Lakes, with the Sears Tower as the focal point of a bloody ritual that will bring Hell to Earth.
No, not really. It's about the fake romantic relationship slowly becoming a real romantic relationship. Everyone knew that was what would happen the second they saw the premise. Holidate still came in at the #5 spot, with 654 million minutes watched. It's getting desperate out here.
Netflix, for its part, counts its ratings differently. Rather than Nielsen's minutes watched, it counts a show as collecting a viewing from its audience if someone sits through at least two minutes of a play session. It announced last week that 62 million households had watched The Queen's Gambit in the 30 days after its initial premiere on October 23, reaching its overall top 10 in 92 countries and scoring the #1 spot in 63 of them. It's officially Netflix's biggest scripted miniseries to date, and to go by recent Internet traffic trends, has spurred an interest in chess in much of its audience.
Source: Deadline