Insights

TV series demand across all platforms for the U.S. (17 - 23 May 2020)

25 May, 2020

Image: She-Ra And The Princesses Of Power, Netflix

Overall

We are excited this week to showcase an entirely new way of presenting the United States’ 10 most in-demand series! Don’t worry, it’s not as drastic a change as it may seem: the underlying numbers are still the exact same Demand Expressions that we track each and every day. The data is still crunched the same way, measuring the desire, engagement, and consumption of thousands of titles by US audiences.

So, what has changed? From now on, we will be contextualizing the data within the whole US market by presenting the Difference from Market Average. We hope you will agree that looking at demand data in this way makes it a lot easier to intuitively grasp exactly how well a show is performing.

For example, the most demanded series in the USA, Spongebob Squarepants, has an average of 94.8 million Demand Expressions this week. Meanwhile, the average (mean) demand for a series in the USA in the same week is 1.1 million. That means that Difference from Market Average is 86.3. Put simply, this week Spongebob Squarepants is 86.3 times more in-demand than the average TV series in the USA.

We would like to specifically point out here that the ranking of each title is completely unaffected by this change. Spongebob Squarepants is ranked number one by Demand Expressions as well. Rick And Morty would still be number two, Game Of Thrones would stay number three, etc, all the way down to the very last title.

With that out of the way, let’s now take a closer look at what’s happening this week in the US overall top ten. As mentioned, with 86.3x the US average Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob Squarepants tops the chart for a second week in row.

Staying with animations, Adult Swim’s Rick And Morty gained 4.1% more demand than last week, growing to 78.8 times more TV series demand than average. A drop in demand for both YTV's My Hero Academia and Disney+’s Star Wars: The Clone Wars means Rick And Morty vaults to 2nd overall. Rick And Morty is continuing to air new episodes of Season 4 weekly.

Lastly in the overall chart, VH1’s RuPaul’s Drag Race returns to the US top ten this week in 8th place. With Season 12 nearly over, fans are getting excited to see who will win the drag queen competition reality show. The season’s finale episode airs next week and so we expect demand for the show to rise even further then.

Digital Original

In the digital original chart, we have a new entry in the digital original top ten. Netflix’s She-Ra And The Princesses Of Power has the 10th highest TV series demand of streaming platform originals and is 29.2 times more in-demand than the average series in America. The fifth and final season of She-Ra And The Princesses Of Power was released on May 15th, driving a peak in demand. Netflix rebooted the 1985 original series in November 2018, releasing 5 seasons since then and garnering an Emmy nomination in 2019.

At the top of the chart, Netflix’s Stranger Things retakes its place as the most demanded digital original series in America. Demand for the sci-fi show grew 6.3% from last week after the official Stranger Things writer’s room Twitter account dropped some cryptic clues for Season 4. Fans are currently desperate for anything new related to the series, after Season 4 was confirmed delayed several months ago.

Finally, Apple TV+’s Defending Jacob returns to the top ten after a one-week absence. This week saw the release of the penultimate episode of the Chris Evans-starring miniseries. As with RuPaul’s Drag Race, we expect TV series demand for Defending Jacob to grow further next week when the finale episode is released.



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