The Umbrella Academy ratings blow away the competition

People watched more minutes of The Umbrella Academy after the second season came out than the next three highest-rated streaming shows combined:

Netflix had a hit with The Umbrella Academy debuted in 2019. The quirky series about a family of maladjusted superheroes was funny, different, and unpredictable, but things didn’t really take off until the second season landed at the tail end of July. That season raised the show’s profile considerably, and now, we know how much.

For decades, Nielsen Media Research has published the Nielsen ratings, the gold standard of what people are watching on TV and in what numbers. For most of its life, Nielsen has done this for broadcast and cable shows, but with streaming being the future of television, it’s recently gotten with the program and started publishing a weekly top ten list of streaming shows, telling us how many minutes people have spent watching various programs.

There are caveats: so far, the list only includes shows streaming on Netflix and Amazon, with other streaming services — Disney+, HBO Max, etc — to be added in the future. It also only covers viewership in the US and only counts views on TV sets, not on phones or tablets.

Still, even with those qualifications, the numbers for The Umbrella Academy are incredibly impressive. Here’s the first top 10 list, which covers streaming viewership for the week of August 3-9, right after the second season debuted:

1. The Umbrella Academy, 3.01 billion minutes viewed
2. Shameless, 1.13 billion
3. Grey’s Anatomy, 918 million
4. The Office, 897 million
5. Criminal Minds, 697 million
6. NCIS, 524 million
7. In the Dark, 418 million
8. Dexter, 316 million
9. Supernatural, 315 million
10. Parks and Recreation, 304 million

Yes, people watched 3.01 billion minutes of the first two seasons of The Umbrella Academy in that span of days alone, more than the next three items on the list combined. I’d say a third season is pretty well guaranteed.

It’s also interesting to see that no Amazon shows made it onto the list; I wonder if things would have been different were other streaming services represented. Also, you’ll notice that The Umbrella Academy is the only Netflix Original Series on there. It’s pretty normal for the bulk of Netflix viewing to come from shows the service didn’t make itself but merely licensed, which is why the news of shows like The Office going to other streaming services is such a big deal (The Office will be on Peacock next year).

Speaking of things that alarm Netflix, the service has been known to complain about the Nielsen ratings because it doesn’t think they give the full picture, what with the caveats I mentioned earlier. But you know what? If Netflix wanted to publish all of its own viewership data, it could, but it chooses not to. And when it does, it pulls tricks like counting someone who watched a show or movie for just two minutes as a “view” of the entire thing, so I’m not inclined to take their concerns very seriously.

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