Streaming Wars • October 2022
Rings of Power’s Fall From Top 10 Spells Trouble for Amazon
As some blockbusters quickly lose their shine, others appear to get stronger with time
In October, HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel narrowly defeated Amazon’s billion-dollar fantasy epic based on the fantasy world of J.R.R. Tolkien. This month, the margin is a lot wider — House of the Dragon remained at #1 while The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power dropped to #13. That’s bad news for Amazon Prime, which has a lot riding on Rings of Power’s continued success. Still, as we see on the leaderboards, plenty of series that lost steam in their second month on the air ended up as fixtures of the Top 20 in 2022, including Peacemaker, Severance, Hawkeye, and Amazon’s own Reacher.
Photo: House of the Dragon, HBO
House of the Dragon Smokes Its Rival
House of the Dragon is beating Rings of Power in every metric by which we measure Engagement. It has more than doubled its rival in Likes, Favorites, Watchlist adds, and shares (though RoP does get slightly more searches than Dragons does). Still, HBO’s fantasy behemoth does have a slight advantage, as its dramatic finale came close to the very end of the month. Time will tell if this prequel spinoff will be as dominant as its predecessor.
Photo: Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, Netflix
Horror Again Enjoys Its Heyday (Or Rather, Heymonth)
After a few flops cast doubt on Ryan Murphy’s status as a golden goose at Netflix, the Nip/Tuck creator delivered two big hits that landed in the Top 10: Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story at #2 and The Watcher at #7, both horror shows. Dahmer seemed to benefit from controversy leading up to its release, as its high Engagement score comes mostly from Watchlist adds.
As with last year, the arrival of Spooky Season proved favorable to horror content more generally, as new series The Winchesters (the CW’s Supernatural prequel) and AMC’s Interview with the Vampire also appeared on the leaderboards. And scratching at the door are two other scary Netflix titles: Midnight Club and Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities sit just outside the Top 20 at #21 and #22, respectively.
Photo: A Friend of the Family, Peacock
Peacock Finds Very Few Friends of Family
Peacock took a stab at horror in October with its true crime miniseries A Friend of the Family, starring Colin Hanks, Anna Paquin, and White Lotus star Jake Lacy. But the show, which comes from the creator of March’s successful miniseries Candy, barely cracked the Top 50, coming in at #44. For every two Watchworthy users who “liked” the show, one “disliked” it, a ratio that’s a little concerning for a show this new. As its rival Paramount+ contemplates picking up Showtime, Peacock appears to be in dire need of a show that can dominate the TV conversation, especially after the respectable but short-lived success of The Resort.
Photo: Andor, Disney+
Once Against, Disney+ Demonstrates Its Strength Is Persistence
In October, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law fell out of the Top 5, to be replaced by Andor, but that doesn’t mean the legal superhero show is down for the count. Moon Knight nearly fell from the leaderboards over this summer, only to rise back up to a Top 5 spot. Book of Boba Fett, hardly a Mandalorian-level success for Disney+, has also made a surprising climb up the leaderboards later in its lifespan. Disney has six different shows in the Top 20 this month, far more than any other streamer. That strength isn’t owed to Disney releasing dozens of new shows each month, but rather one or two that perform consistently over long periods of time.
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.
