Stop me if you heard that. You're at a holiday gathering and a very offline family member starts chatting about the show Yellowstone. Soon after, a very online family member looks up confused and asks either what the show is or why they keep hearing about it even though no one they know seems to watch it.
But maybe it's not Yellowstone. Maybe it's La Reina Del Sur or The Glory, or maybe it's Ginny & Georgia. What all three series have in common is that they are among the most watched series on Netflix between January and June 2023, and if you've never heard of them, it's probably because you're part of the growing divide between series people talking about it online and about the ones that everyone actually watches.
These new Netflix numbers come from one of the most detailed reports Netflix has ever released publicly. It shows approximately how many hours a season of a show or movie has been watched, when that content first premiered, and whether that content is available worldwide (and thus potentially has a larger international audience). You can scroll through the whole report here – I've done that in the last few days. Sometimes I just wanted to see whether a show I liked was better or worse than the 18,213 or so other pieces of content on the list, sometimes I laughed at the winners and losers. (I for one find it hysterical that White Chicks is streaming longer than Better Call Saul Season 3.)
Mainly I was just thinking about how different this list is from what a lot of people would have expected. When you talk to people online, the Netflix shows they talk about are usually pretty heavily rooted in genre (The Witcher, Stranger Things) or a very specific type of prestige TV (The Crown). But these shows don't always have the legs you'd expect. The fifth season of The Crown premiered in November 2022 and reached a sales figure of 153. Since we don't have the 2022 numbers, we can't say how far they fell from release to January 2023, but you can go with it Certainly say it was a much bigger drop than Wednesday, which premiered around the same time and landed comfortably in the top 10 most-watched shows on Netflix.
The third season of The Witcher was released on June 29th and just managed to reach the top 550 most-watched series. But when you compare the previous seasons to the performance of the previous season of Ginny & Georgia, it's not a contest that shows more people were willing to catch up. Although the first season of Ginny & Georgia came out in 2021, it landed firmly in the top ten right alongside the new season, which premiered in January, coming in at number two overall. Previous seasons of The Witcher were at 165 and 227 respectively.
All of this suggests that Ginny & Georgia is part of the whole range of things that a lot of people watch but perhaps don't post about in threads or use to build a following on TikTok.
And the confusion and bewilderment I saw over the popularity of Ginny & Georgia reminded me of similar conversations in the '90s when the Usenet forums were searching for a new episode of Acts as Monday Night Football and ER at the helm of the Nielsen charts were released next week. They've forgotten that their very vocal community is actually much smaller than the community of people who just watch stuff and don't really talk about it afterwards.
A lot of people may be talking about The Witcher online, but far fewer people have actually seen it. Image: Netflix / Susan Allnutt
And it's easy to forget that this is how television ratings have always worked – that shows driven by calm audiences dominate the charts. For years, streaming has been a black box of cherry-picked numbers, designed to promote the shows that streaming services talk about and then subscribe to to watch for yourself, rather than the less exciting stuff that many people watch on their own Spending days looking at each other in silence and never discussing it. This is one of the main reasons why many critics and analysts have been so frustrated with the black box method. They knew this was happening, it was just hard to measure it externally when people watching shows like Ginny & Georgia didn't immediately flock to an easy-to-follow platform to talk about it.
But things have changed radically in the last year and surprise data dumps like the one Netflix shared are becoming more common. First, because streaming services are now contractually obligated to share viewership with the actors and writers who create their content. Hollywood unions scored big in the summer and fall strikes and now have access to all the viewership that services like Netflix were previously reluctant to share.
And secondly, the 0 percent interest rate days are over, when a streaming service could throw anything at the wall and see what sticks. Netflix and its competitors are now heavily dependent on their fast-growing advertising businesses—which means they need fewer super-expensive shows that get big buzz (and often see big drops in viewership) and cheaper shows that attract those quiet casual viewers Who will watch a Tide commercial to see what happens next?
And because the advertising business is becoming increasingly important to these companies, this in turn means that these numbers will appear more and more frequently. Advertisers need real metrics to understand where they should place their ads.
And I think that means that in the coming years, the way we talk about all these streaming shows will also change. “Ginny & Georgia” will probably stop being the show you furiously Googled when you started reading this article and start sitting in the same place in your brain as “NCIS” or “Grey’s Anatomy.” . And this is a good place for it, because we didn't know it, but it was there from the beginning.