Suits smashes another streaming record
The long-since cancelled USA legal series has secured a major streaming crown from Netflix's Ozark
Another week, another streaming record absolutely demolished by former USA series Suits. This week (which is to say, the week of September 4, because these things roll out on a one-month delay) the legal drama has officially secured its place as the king of the Nielsen streaming charts, with Deadline reporting that the series has broken Ozark’s previous record for consecutive weeks as the most streamed show in the U.S.
(The main caveat here is that Nielsen has only been measuring streaming rankings since 2020, so there’s about 7 years of data that went uncollected. None of which changes the fact that Suits has now formally dominated the existing rankings from the last three years, placing first for 12 straight weeks in a row.)
Meanwhile, in those portions of the rankings actually capable of movement, Netflix’s Canadian drama Virgin River, which just released the first half of its fifth season, has supplanted the streamer’s One Piece in the 2nd place position. (The fact that Virgin River now has 56 episodes to its name presumably helped it overtake the single-season One Piece, which has only aired 8 installments to date, when Nielsen is tallying up total minutes viewed.) The 2023 live-action Little Mermaid film, in its first week of streaming availability, landed at fourth, with 1.389 billion minutes viewed (which adds up to roughly 10 million viewings), while TV series S.W.A.T. and Bluey brought up the rear. (Never count out Bluey; Bluey is bulletproof..)
It’s worth noting that the Suits wave is abating a bit, as we look at the last several weeks of Nielsen numbers (although abating in a way that still adds up to 4,488 years of human of existence spent on the show in a single week). So far, it’s lost about half of the huge bump that the former USA series got when it first went on Netflix—it was already on poor, forgotten Peacock—a few months back. If trends continue, at some point it will, presumably, actually slip, and its current 400 billion minute lead over the competition might finally expire. But, uh… probably not any time very soon.