Image: American Horror Story, FX
The big riser on the TV series demand chart this week is FX’s American Horror Story. Each season of the show has a new setting and the new Season 9 – subtitled American Horror Story: 1984 – takes inspiration from 80’s slasher films. Season 9 premiered on September 18th and compared to last week, American Horror Story has 48% more demand. This means it has risen 13 places and is now ranked as the 8th most demanded show in the USA.
This week sees a rise in interest for topical comedy shows. Comedy Central’s The Daily Show re-enters the US top ten, moving up one place from 11th last week. The show was more on top of breaking news than usual this week, as it happened to have Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor as a scheduled guest the day after new sexual misconduct allegations broke about Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Demand for NBC’s Saturday Night Live increased by 31% from last week, moving to 7th from 12th ahead of next week’s return to broadcast. The long-running current affairs comedy show has been in the news itself this week for casting choices. These include hiring the first regular Asian-American cast member, as well as the hiring and almost immediate firing for inappropriate behaviour of a different cast member.
In last week’s US charts, we witnessed the exciting ‘first’ of four digital originals in the overall top ten series. However, this digital original takeover of US TV series demand proved to be short-lived. This week, we are back down to two, in the form of continuing market leader Stranger Things from Netflix and Titans from DC Universe. It will be interesting to see how long it takes until four or more digital originals appear in the overall top ten again – we suspect it will be sooner rather than later.
The list of the top ten digital originals by American audience TV series demand does not have any huge changes from last week. Stranger Things continues to be the series with the most demand in both the overall and digital original charts. However, the weekly average for the Netflix drama has now dropped below 100 million average Demand Expressions. This is the first time that demand for Stranger Things has been below that benchmark since before Season 3 released in early July.
Other digital originals have shuffled places slightly from last week. The biggest risers from last week’s top ten are Titans and Amazon Prime Video’s The Boys, both of which are up two places. Of all the top ten originals this week, Titans has the largest increase in US demand. The superhero series has 8% more demand compared to last week, driven by a new villain arriving in the latest episode.
Returning to the US digital original series top ten this week are Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale in 9th and Netflix’s Lucifer in 10th. These shows placed 11th and 12th respectively last week. Since then, each show has had a 4% increase in demand and gained two places. They replace Amazon Prime Video’s Carnival Row and Netflix’s Mindhunter, which both remain in the US top 20.
