The Penguin premiere gets great ratings in line with The Last of Us, House of the Dragon

Let's talk about TV ratings! What shows are doing well and which are tanking? The new hot show on the block this week is The Penguin, a spinoff of The Batman starring a heavily made-up Colin Farrell as Oswald Cobb, Batman's nemesis in the making. Critics, including us, love the gritty, Sopranos-esque crime drama, and it looks like viewers are right there with us. Per Variety, HBO says that The Penguin nabbed 5.3 million viewers for its premiere episode within four days of its release across both HBO and Max. That's better than the season 4 premiere of Succession and the season 2 premiere of The White Lotus, two other top-tier HBO dramas, although below the take for the season 4 premiere of True Detective: Night Country. And The Penguin got the best numbers for a new series on Max since 2022's The Last of Us.

Those are the numbers from HBO. Samba TV, a third party company that measures ratings, reports that The Penguin premiere was watched by 3.2 million households, which I suppose is not the same thing as viewers, in its first four days of availability. According to TheWrap, that bests the numbers for the House of the Dragon season 2 premiere, which was watched by only 2.8 million households over this time period. But reporting from the time says that the House of the Dragon season 2 premiere was watched by 7.8 million viewers on the night, which is a lot.

So this is all harder to parse than you might think, but I think we can all walk away from it knowing that a lot of people are watching and enjoying The Penguin. When it comes to TV ratings, the most reliable source is Nielsen, which doesn't get out its ratings until about a month after the fact.

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power breaks onto the Nielsen charts

Speaking of Nielsen, they just released their streaming ratings chart for the week of August 26 through September 1. Let's take a look:

1. Prison Break (HuluNetflix): 1.188 billion minutes streamed
2. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (Prime Video): 1.015 billion minutes
3. Familiy Guy (Hulu): 1.005 billion
4. A Discovery of Witches (Netflix): 915 million minutes streamed
5. The Accident (Netflix): 891 million minutes
6. Dark Winds (Netflix): 890 million
7. Bluey (Disney+): 880 million
8. Worst Ex Ever (Netflix): 830 million
9. Grey's Anatomy (Hulu/Netflix): 724 million
10. Bob's Burgers (Hulu): 693 million

The first three episodes of The Rings of Power season 2 dropped on August 29, so it had just a few days to rack up over a billion minutes watched. Nielsen doesn't separate episodes by season, so those billion minutes encompass the entirety of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, not just the three new episodes of season 2. Still, Nielsen said that around 70% of those minutes were for the new episodes.

Another caveat: Nielsen only measures U.S. viewership, whereas Amazon says that around 70% of the audience for The Rings of Power comes from outside the U.S. So once again, things aren't entirely straightforward, but the numbers are decent.

That said, the numbers of The Rings of Power season 2 aren't as good as they were for season 1, which racked up 1.2 billion minutes viewed with only two episodes available back in 2022. Also, The Rings of Power wasn't streamed more than Prison Break, a show that ended in 2017. Never estimate the power of an old show to find new life on Netflix, unquestionably the biggest streamer out there. Just look how good Netflix has been to shows like A Discovery of Witches. It's also great to see the George R.R. Martin-produced show Dark Winds getting some love on Netflix.

In any case, new episodes of The Rings of Power come out on Prime Video Thursdays; there's only one episode left in the second season. New episodes of The Penguin will air on HBO and Max on Sundays...even though the premiere episode aired on Thursday. I don't know what HBO was thinking there but I do know the show is worth watching, so hopefully people follow it to its new day.

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