Netflix’s ‘Luther: The Fallen Sun’ Rises to Top Streaming’s Most-Watched List | Charts
Netflix’s film continuation of the popular BBC crime series “Luther: The Fallen Sun” earned the top spot in streaming for the week of March 8-14 in the latest Wrap Report tracking the most watched programs across linear TV and streaming, according to viewership trends collected from Samba TV’s panel of more than 3 million households drawn from over 25 million connected TVs, balanced to the U.S. Census.
Featuring Idris Elba reprising his role as Luther and co-starring Andy Serkis and Cynthia Erivo, the film rolled out in select theaters in February before making its streaming debut on Netflix last week. The movie sequel succeeded so far in retaining its die-hard fans while at the same time solidifying new ones by tapping into a global audience beyond viewers of the British series, which has three seasons available to stream on Pluto TV and all five seasons on Hulu. The fragmented streaming rights situation doesn’t seem to have deterred fans of the show.
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Netflix also continues to find success with its investments in docuseries with a string of documentary-style series diving deep into unsolved mysteries. Flying onto the charts for the week was a new three-part series, “MH370: The Plane That Disappeared,” at No. 2, with subsequent episodes landing at No. 4. and No. 6. The investigative docuseries explores the mysterious case of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 that vanished from all radar with 239 passengers aboard in 2014. The series debuted on March 8, nine years to the day after the flight’s disappearance.
Joe Goldberg climbed back to No. 7, with four of the five episodes of the second half of “You” Season 4 landing on the most-streamed list. “You” saw a 37% dropoff between the initial and second-half premieres. Netflix attempted to feed the binge-watching demands of many viewers while staving off subscriber churn in tinkering with its release model for the series, but the end result differed from the latest season of “Stranger Things,” which saw an uptick in viewership across the split premieres.
“You” Season 4 drew both Gen Z and Millennial households, the former overindexing by strong double digits compared to the national average. Black households also drove strong viewership this season, overindexing on both premieres by 15%.
It was another good week for Disney+. The streamer once again had the only non-Netflix program to land on the charts with the second episode of “The Mandalorian” debuting at No. 3.
For the second consecutive week, Chris Rock’s live standup special, “Selective Outrage,” delivered again for Netflix at No. 5 in the run-up to the 95th Academy Awards ceremony, possibly ginning up audiences for this year’s historic award show with his riff on the slap that everyone remembers from last year’s show.
While not included in our linear rankings, ABC’s Oscars saw 13.3 million households tuning in and viewership of the event rose 15% from 2022, according to Samba TV data. Audiences tended to be more diverse than previous years, as Asian households overindexed by 14% in viewership of this year’s event, up 5 percentage points from 2022. Age trends of this year’s Oscars remained consistent with 2022 levels, as awards shows in general struggle to bring in younger viewers. Viewership of the ceremony skewed towards older audiences, with households of ages 75 and up overindexing by the highest margin (+22%), and Gen Z and Millennial audiences underindexing.
Competition television series dominated linear television once again as ABC’s “American Idol” and NBC’s “The Voice” nabbed the top spots in the week. ABC’s two-part episodes of “The Bachelor” both ranked at No. 4 and No. 5 as Zach Shallcross embarked on hometown dates with the final four women. Those eliminated spoke out in the drama-filled “Women Tell All” episode where next season’s “Bachelorette” Charity Lawson was named.
Crime dramas showed consistent performance for CBS, with episodes of “FBI,” “NCIS,” and “FBI: International” all topping the chart.
Dallas Lawrence is the SVP and head of communications and brand at Samba TV, a WrapPRO partner. Follow him on Twitter at @DallasLawrence. For more from Samba TV, click here.
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