‘Fool Me Once’ Boasts Record-Setting 3B Viewing Minutes In Debut Week; ‘Reacher’ Gets Retroactive Audience Wins After Nielsen Solves Amazon Glitch

Audiences did a lot of streaming in the first week of January.

According to Nielsen, there were six titles with more than 1B minutes viewed from January 1 to January 7, with the series in first place topping 3B.

Before diving into that, the company issued a correction on the last two weeks of December, which were inaccurately reported due to a glitch with Prime Video‘s audio asset capture meant that reporting for any title added to the service between December 20 and January 16 is delayed.

That means that Reacher was actually No. 1 for the weeks of December 18 and December 25 with about 1.4B viewing minutes each week.

When Nielsen previously reported the numbers for these weeks, viewing for Episodes 4 and 5 of Reacher Season 2 were not counted. Still, the series managed to stay afloat on the charts despite not getting a boost from the new episodes. Reacher has been battling it out with Young Sheldon for first place over the past few weeks, and it looks like the Amazon series did, in fact, win out.

Both titles were bested by Fool Me Once on Netflix during this latest reported interval from January 1 to 7. That series amassed just over 3B viewing minutes — the first original title to do so since before the strikes. More generally, Suits was the last title to reach those heights over the summer.

The viewership for Fool Me Once was more than Reacher (second place) and Young Sheldon (third place) combined. Reacher did put up its fourth straight week of a billion viewing minutes, though, which is still a pretty big feat.

The other three titles to tally over 1B viewing minutes for the week were Bluey, Grey’s Anatomy and The Equalizer 3. Bluey and Grey’s are staples in the overall list, so their presence is not anything new. The Equalizer 3 landed on Netflix on January 1, which explains the sudden viewership boom. Since it’s a film with a limited run time, it is unlikely to stay on the charts for long.

Aquaman barely missed the billion-minute club with 955M minutes in the week that it joined Netflix. The film had previously been on Max and, while there is no available data to say exactly how much viewership it was getting over there, let’s just say it wasn’t anywhere on the streaming Top 10. Warner Bros. Discovery has been experimenting with licensing more content back to Netflix, with Young Sheldon being another example, and it seems to be working in the company’s favor.

In fact, The Big Bang Theory came in at No. 10 on the overall list this week, despite ending its run several years ago. This boom in viewership is likely driven, at least in part, by the success of Young Sheldon on Netflix, driving viewers to watch the series that introduced the character of Sheldon Cooper.

Elsewhere on the lists, Percy Jackson and the Olympians remained on the streaming originals list, but viewership was down 10% to just 627M minutes with the addition of Episode 4. While viewing minutes are down slightly, this is actually fairly standard, as most shows lose some of their audience over the course of the season. Considering the series only has around three hours of available runtime, this is still a strong weekly total.

Also on the streaming originals list was The Act, which appears to have had a resurgence following Gypsy Rose Blanchard’s release from prison. 

Here is the full Top 10, with streaming service, title, number of episodes (“1″=feature film) and minutes of viewing: