It was another week with no billion-minute club honorees on the Nielsen streaming charts, as The Crown took the top spot.
With help from the first four episodes of the final season, the Netflix series garnered 943M minutes viewed from November 13 to November 19. As Nielsen pointed out in its report this week, the final season of The Crown marks the end of an era for Netflix, as the series about the British royal family was one of the first streaming originals that was designed to attract an older audience.
It proved to be a strong acquisition title for Netflix, and the fact that it tallied more than 900M minutes viewed in the first few days that new episodes were available speaks to its lasting popularity. Nielsen reports that The Crown has the third-highest concentration of viewers older than 50 among this interval’s Top 10 titles, beat out by Six Feet Under and All The Light We Cannot See.
Grey’s Anatomy had another big week in second place with 937M minutes viewed. It’s still unclear what, exactly, is prompting a resurgence in viewership for the long-running ABC drama, since new episodes have not been available on Netflix since June. Whatever the reason, it’s good news for Disney, which plans to have all seasons of Grey’s available on its own streaming platform once it merges with Hulu in March.
The overall list was fairly dominated by acquired titles during this week, including Suits, which fell to fourth place with 794M minutes viewed. That’s the lowest its viewership has dropped in quite a while, which makes sense given most viewers have likely wrapped up their binge by now.
Netflix recently released a new bi-annual report of viewership across all titles on its platform for the first six months of the year. The data for Suits was skewed, since it was only available for about two weeks in that measurement interval, but the next bi-annual report should give a better indication of how the viewership panned out across the entire series over these last few months, since the report breaks titles down by season.
Another acquired title that has had staying power over the last few reports is Friends, which began to see a surge in viewership following Matthew Perry’s death. This week, it came in sixth place overall on the chart with 750M minutes viewed. According to Nielsen, Friends has been attracting quite a few first time viewers this time around.
In fact, acquired titles saw much more viewership than original titles this week, with the exception of The Crown. The next most-watched streaming original was The Great British Baking Show with 470M minutes viewed. That’s less than every other title in the acquired Top 10 list, which had The Big Bang Theory in last place with 504M minutes viewed.
While it’s quite rare for comedy specials to break through the noise (primarily due to their very short runtime, which puts them at a disadvantage in these rankings), Matt Rife: Natural Selection managed to do just that. The Netflix special earned a spot on the streaming originals chart with 314M minutes viewed. Nielsen says the 18-49 demo made up 70% of its audience.
Here is the full Top 10 for overall and originals, with streaming service, title, number of episodes (“1″=feature film or series premiere) and minutes of viewing:
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