Streaming Wars • March 2022
From Inventing Anna to The Dropout, Scam Culture Stories Are Stealing the Show
Many of the much-hyped series of 2022 finally got their due in March among Watchworthy users — Netflix’s Inventing Anna, HBO’s Peacemaker, Peacock’s Bel-Air and NBC’s The Endgame all appeared in the Watchworthy Top 20 after premiering a month ago or earlier. Meanwhile, Hulu’s The Dropout, which premiered March 3, debuted at #11, while NBC’s The Thing About Pam came close to the Top 20 with its #22 debut. America’s appetite for ripped-from-the-headlines dramas seems to be exactly as strong as Hollywood expected it would be, even though many of the real stories on which these shows are based lost the nation’s attention years ago. Along with these new shows, some older series made surprising comebacks, including Korean sensation Squid Game, Hulu’s mystery/comedy Only Murders in the Building, and last year’s ensemble drama The White Lotus.
Photo: Inventing Anna, Netflix
Femme-Focused True Stories of Crime and Scandal Win Big in March
Last month we noted with some pessimism that Inventing Anna was off to a slow start following its February 11 premiere, but the Julia Garner-led series about the rise and fall of “scam culture” superstar Anna Delvey has since proved us wrong. The show was #3 overall in March, beating all but two series, both MCU powerhouses. At #11 is The Dropout, Hulu’s story about Elizabeth Holmes, the tech entrepreneur convicted on four counts of fraud. Both these shows are based on news stories that took the world by storm three or four years ago, but it appears that time hasn’t lessened people’s interest in them.
On the other hand, some true stories of greed and deception in the tech sector aren’t registering quite as much with viewers. Showtime’s Super Pumped paints an unflattering picture of Uber founder Travis Kalanick, while WeCrashed offers a similar perspective on WeWork founder Adam Neumann. Neither show has managed to get into the Top 40, which one could interpret to mean that viewers find the stories of controversial women more compelling, sympathetic, or just plain interesting than they do those of controversial men.
Photo: Peacemaker, HBO Max
Peacemaker Finally Builds Momentum
Jumping 20 spots from February, John Cena’s Peacemaker is finally starting to look like what HBO Max intended it to be: a superhero series that could do for DC Comics what Disney+ has done for Marvel. A #13 show may not come close to the kind of performance put up by a show like Loki, which is #1 on the Watchworthy leaderboards for the seventh time. But these things take time — Disney+’s first MCU show, WandaVision, didn’t break into the Top 20 until March 2021, two months after its premiere. Having matched that milestone, Peacemaker could be the start of something huge for HBO Max.
Photo: Peacemaker, Disney+
With Hawkeye Slipping Away and Falcon Set to Expire, Disney+ Needs a Miracle from Moon Knight
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier premiered in March 2021 — this will be the last month the show will grace the Watchworthy Top 20, as we only consider shows made in the last year. And while the series finished strong, going beyond the #3 spot for the first time since it topped the list in April 2021, its disappearance will create a power vacuum traditionally filled by MCU series.
Loki isn’t losing strength, but Hawkeye dropped out of the Top 20 in March after finishing at #2 in February. That puts a lot of pressure on Moon Knight, which actually fell 10 spots the month of its premiere (engagement was higher with the show the month before it dropped). But we’ve yet to see an MCU show fail to top our list. While it may not be immediate, Moon Knight is likely to be extremely competitive in the coming months.
Photo: The Endgame, NBC
Primetime TV Is Still Being Streamed
Streaming services like Hulu and Peacock offer cord-cutters a way to watch shows still airing on the big four networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox), and the leaderboard indicates there’s a good reason to do so. For example, NBC’s The Endgame is #9 in March. Because Watchworthy is designed to help people decide which TV shows to stream, that suggests a sizable portion of the show’s audience is streaming the crime thriller on Peacock. Also strong this month is NBC’s The Thing About Pam, as well as ABC’s feel-good sitcom Abbott Elementary. We’ll see if the performance of these shows remains high from month to month, but indicators suggest that Peacock in particular, which hasn’t always been steady, is proving a worthwhile investment for NBC.
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.
