Image: Star Trek: Picard, CBS All Access
Long-running sketch show Saturday Night Live is still flying high this week. For the second week in a row, the NBC comedy is the most demanded series by American audiences. This week’s show featured as host RuPaul Charles of RuPaul’s Drag Race, one of the most demanded reality shows in the USA, with popstar Justin Bieber as musical guest.
US demand for NBC’s The Good Place continues to grow after the show’s January 30th series finale. The reaction of both fans and critics to the sitcom’s ended was generally very positive, with plentiful discussion and retrospectives driving an additional 17.3% more demand than last week.
Rounding off a good week for the network, this week’s largest increase belongs to NBC’s Brooklyn Nine-Nine. The NYPD sitcom gained 28% more demand from last week and rose 17 places to 10th. This high increase is due to the February 6th premiere of Season 7. The fact Brooklyn Nine-Nine rose so much with only two days of post-premiere demand suggests the comedy could have staying power.
This week, Disney CEO Bob Iger stated that the short-term priority for Star Wars is TV. Looking at the US digital original chart makes his reasoning clear. For the 4th week in a row, Disney+’s The Mandalorian stays the top show in the USA. Audience anticipation is also high for Disney+ series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which premieres on February 21st. The fact there are two Star Wars series in the US digital original top ten, combined with declining revenues for Star Wars theatrical movies, makes it easy to understand why Disney is shifting focus for the franchise.
Streaming television demand for Star Trek: Picard is still rising after entering the digital original top ten last week. The debut season of the CBS All Access show premiered on 23rd January. Interestingly, for most of the week CBS made the entire first episode available for free on their YouTube channel. This echoes the promotion of Star Trek: Discovery, where the first episodes were also made widely available by being broadcast on the CBS network simultaneously with the CBS All Access release.
This week sees the return of Netflix’s BoJack Horseman to the digital charts. The dark comedy’s final season was released on January 31st. Like The Good Place, the critical response to the ending was mostly positive. This drove BoJack Horseman’s streaming television demand to more than double from last week.
