Not even Star Wars is a match for Suits
Nielsen's latest numbers suggests that shows like Disney+'s Ahsoka can't hold a candle to the power of Netflix and Peacock's Suits reruns
Although we have never, personally, spent millions of dollars and god knows how many hours of human creativity to make a Star Wars TV show—hey, fingers crossed for next year, though!—we have to assume that it’s probably pretty hard to do. Certainly, it seems like the sort of thing where, once you’ve done it, you’d like your end product to be met with, if not thundering, rapturous applause, then at least a response enthusiastic enough that it beats out the online reactions to a decade-old basic cable legal drama.
But alas, this is not Ahsoka’s fate.
This is per Deadline, reporting on the latest streaming numbers from Nielsen, which cover the week of August 21—a.k.a., the Rosario Dawson Disney+ show’s second week of availability. Which saw it, surprise surprise, fall fall short of the viewing bar set by former USA series Suits, because we don’t know if you’ve heard yet, but this Suits show is pretty hot right now, despite having been off the air for like 4 years at this point.
In fact, Ahsoka didn’t even do well enough in the streaming rankings to merit the courtesy of being directly stomped by the former USA series, which picked up 2.6 billion minutes of viewing time during the week in question, spread across both Netflix and Peacock. The Star Wars series actually came in fifth in Nielsen’s figures, trailing behind Netflix’s Who Is Erin Carter, Disney+’s own kid-focused Bluey, and the whopping juggernaut that is Netflix’s 417 episodes of Grey’s Anatomy. Which is all to say that, yeah, the latest Star Wars series is getting its ass kicked by reruns, even if, on an episode-by-episode basis, its 829 million minutes of viewing aren’t too shabby. (And we should acknowledge here that there’s a certain degree of apples vs. oranges involved in comparing 8 seasons of Suit to 2 episodes of Ahsoka, even if measuring the sheer number of minutes of human life each show is eating per week is about as good a metric as any to determine how much value a service is getting out of its content.)
It’ll be interesting to see how Ahsoka does as the numbers from later weeks start rolling out; the series has gotten decent reviews over its last month-plus on TV, but it’s not clear how well viewer enthusiasm is holding up as the show’s first season runs its course.