Streaming Wars • February 2022
As Dominant Shows Age Out, New Premieres from HBO Struggle to Be Seen
Disney+’s WandaVision finally turned 1 year old last month, which took it out of the competition on the Watchworthy leaderboards. Amazon powerhouse Tell Me Your Secrets will age out after this month, and the final days of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Mare of Easttown are numbered, as well. But newer shows like Peacemaker, Raised by Wolves 2, and Inventing Anna aren’t yet close to taking their place. With some noted exceptions like Amazon’s Reacher, Apple TV+’s The Afterparty, and Netflix’s The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window, shows that premiered in February or late in January are having trouble gaining a footing. Some platforms, like Netflix, bucked that trend with popular new releases, while others, like Amazon Prime, succeeded in spite of it with popular but aging series.
Photo: Tell Me Your Secrets, Amazon Prime
With Tell Me Your Secrets Pushing Into Top 5 and Strong Reacher Debut, Amazon Prime Makes Most of Short Month
Tell Me Your Secrets was released last year on February 19, which means it ceased to qualify as a new show on the Watchworthy leaderboards well before the month was through. But that didn’t stop this thriller series from rising all the way up to #4 in February, its highest point since Midnight Mass, another series starring Hamish Linklater, brought it back into the spotlight in November 2021.
Along with Underground Railroad, another 2021 show enjoying a recent burst of interest, and Reacher, a series that premiered in February and is already ranked #7, Tell Me Your Secrets is one of three Amazon Originals in February’s Top 10. That’s more than the streaming service has managed in the history of our Streaming Wars series, which dates back to November 2020. Wheel of Time may not be pulling as much weight as the platform might have hoped (it even wasn’t among the Top 50 in February), but there’s no doubt Prime’s outlook is looking rosy. That’s reflected in the platform leaderboards, where Amazon saw an increase in its share of Engagement as new seasons of beloved series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Upload are released.
Photo: The Gilded Age, HBO Max
HBO Max’s Latest Offerings Make Little Impact
The end of January saw two critically lauded releases from HBO Max: period drama The Gilded Age from Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes and upbeat comedy Somebody Somewhere. Before then, Suicide Squad spinoff Peacemaker made waves in the TV world. Yet Peacemaker appeared on the leaderboards only at #33 in February, while the other two series haven’t registered at all yet. The lead series for HBO Max was Mare of Easttown for the eighth consecutive month. With the one-year anniversary of Kate Winslet’s Emmy-winning turn as a down-and-out detective in a small Pennsylvania town approaching in April, the show’s streaming service will need one of its other series to become competitive quickly if it’s to overtake Amazon for third place.
Photo: The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window, Netflix
Crime Parodies Steal the Show for Netflix, While Shondaland Suffers
Inventing Anna is the first new series out of Shondaland since 2020, and while it’s still too early to say for sure, its first month in the Streaming Wars would indicate that it’s no Bridgerton. The ripped-from-the-headlines docudrama premiered to mixed reviews and a #31 spot on the Watchworthy leaderboards. Meanwhile, two less-hyped February premieres, Murderville and The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window, performed well, with the latter series debuting at #3. One is a partly scripted, partly improvised satire of police procedurals, while the other is a dry parody of crime thrillers, but the fact that they’re both making light of our obsession with TV about criminals may say something about current trends in streaming television.
And this doesn’t just apply to Netflix. Hulu’s new docudrama Pam & Tommy mixes comedy, crime, and pop culture history in a way that jibes with viewers, while Apple TV'+’s The Afterparty puts a comedic spin on the whodunit mystery. Both shows earned spots in the Top 20 in February after premiering in late January or early February.
Photo: WandaVision, Disney+
WandaVision Disappears, Sapping Marvel’s Strength
Having premiered in January 2021, WandaVision stopped qualifying as a new show in February and disappeared from the Top 20. Loki, Hawkeye, and Winter Soldier remain strong, but with Book of Boba Fett falling 33 spots, there’s plenty of reason to doubt that Disney+’s grip on trending new TV will last forever. That said, with Moon Knight dropping at the end of March (the series is already ranked #25 a month before its premiere), competitors may not get the chance to take advantage of WandaVision’s loss.
Our Methodology
In 30 seconds, our Watchworthy recommendation app learns your taste in TV and gives every show a “Worthy Score” specifically for you: the higher a given show’s Worthy Score, the more likely it is you will enjoy that show. Each month we track user engagement across thousands of series for every major streaming service. All of these signals are combined into a single metric called Watchworthy Engagement. This enables Ranker to determine which service’s content has the highest engagement — in other words, the streaming platforms who are winning the Streaming Wars.
The Top 20 shows measures which new series (premiered two years ago or later) are garnering the most Engagement from our users month to month. The most Watchworthy platform measures Engagement across all TV shows, new and old, and aggregates them according to the platform they stream on.
