In this article we look at the top breakout shows of the past week. Breakout shows are the most in-demand series that have premiered in the past 100 days.
Peacock revisited the 1999 film The Best Man (and its 2013 sequel The Best Man Holiday) with an 8 part series, The Best Man: The Final Chapters, which released all of its episodes on December 22nd. The new series made a splash this week after releasing all of its episodes on December 22nd. It ranked as the 8th most in-demand recently released series and had 16.5 times the average series demand for the week. This is yet another example of companies turning to existing IP for new material. Peacock has had success with this model before when it rebooted The Fresh Prince franchise with Bel-Air. However, the success of The Best Man may be more interesting for Paramount+ this year as that streamer has a number of classic movies scheduled to be rebooted as series including Grease, Flashdance, and Fatal Attraction. Expect a tidal wave of nostalgia in 2023.
Wednesday continues to hold onto the top spot in our ranking for another week. Demand for the show fell by 11% this week but that is a much slower decline than last week's 38% drop. At 43.3x demand, the Addams Family spinoff has a large lead over other new series, but demand for the show doesn't just look impressive compared to other recent releases. For the first half of December, Wednesday was the most in-demand show available to stream on Netflix, beating out even Stranger Things.
The final week of data from 2022 saw a surge in demand across recent anime series. Three anime series from three different Japanese networks all saw double digit demand increases this week. New to the top ten chart this week is Bocchi the Rock! from Tokyo MX. It is a bit of a late bloomer having premiered October 9th but the show reached a new demand peak following its season finale on December 25th. Demand for Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury was up by 18% this week and Chainsaw Man was the highest ranked of these series with 28.8x demand.
Demand for 1899 inched up by 3% this week, after last week's 5% increase in demand. This increase in demand came before the announcement on January 2nd that Netflix had cancelled the show. After it premiered on November 17th, it ranked near the top of our new shows ranking and the fact that it has grown in demand for the past two weeks points to the show's longevity. The show's creators were also behind Dark, which became one of Netflix's biggest international hits. These factors make it all the more surprising that Netflix prematurely axed the show and left fans sorely disappointed.
