Streaming Wars • September 2022
House of the Dragon and Rings of Power Fight Epic Battle for Streaming Wars Supremacy
There can only be one winner, but the Top 5 is once again full of big-budget, high-octane fantasy and sci-fi hits.
With the Emmys finally behind us, it seems a new era has dawned for the Streaming Wars — or rather, the return of the old status quo. After a summer defined by inventive, cerebral dramas, action and adventure have come back to the fore for Watchworthy users. There are some exceptions, however, with the Steve Carell-led psychological thriller The Patient making an impressive debut at #5, and the returning Abbott Elementary climbing 18 spots to return to the Top 20.
Photo: House of the Dragon, HBO
Superheroes and Fantasy Legends Conquer September
While summer is typically the season for blockbusters in movie theaters, it seems that on the small screen, autumn is when things really get explosive. HBO’s House of the Dragon handily defeated its fantasy rival The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power last month, getting nearly twice the engagement as the tremendously expensive Amazon series. Directly behind Rings of Power was the Korean supernatural drama Hellbound, which likely got a last-minute boost from the September 24 announcement from Netflix that the series would be renewed for a second season.
Not all the news was good for this genre: The Sandman fell from #3 to #7 after an impressive debut in August, while Squid Game fell 14 spots in its last month on the charts. Still, it’s hard not to look at these results and think of the time, not so long ago, when The Bear, The Old Man, and The Summer I Turned Pretty dominated the Top 20.
Photo: She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, Disney+
Disney+ Covers the Board
Andor premiered about a week away from the end of September, yet it was the 14th most Watchworthy series last month. That very promising debut was just one of many bright spots for Disney+ in September, with She-Hulk moving into the Top 5 and The Book of Boba Fett rising 10 spots since August. Alongside Hawkeye, Moon Knight, and Obi-Wan Kenobi, Disney+ had six series on the Top 20 in September, an impressive total that reminds us of when Loki, WandaVision, and The Mandalorian commanded the Watchworthy leaderboards.
Photo: The Resort, Peacock
Smaller Streamers Pushed Out by Big-Budget Offerings
The presence of big names from Disney+, HBO, Amazon, and Netflix made it harder for newer streamers to make their presence felt on the board. Gone from the Top 20 in September are Peacock’s The Resort and Apple TV+’s Blackbird, while Severance fell two spots after its Emmys bump in August. Yellowstone prequel 1883 made a return in September, just getting through the door at #20 after being pushed out at the end of the summer, but that’s the only spot of good news for Paramount+ since April, when Halo and Ghosts were both competitive on the leaderboards.
Photo: The Patient, FX/Hulu
Some Prestige Dramas Remain Popular — But for How Long
Starring Domhnall Gleeson and Steve Carell, The Patient’s star power is undoubtedly a big reason behind its #5 debut in September. While Severance did drop since August, the decline wasn’t big enough to definitively indicate that it’s set to drop out of the Top 20 completely. And while The Devil in Ohio is more “Blumhouse-style horror” than classic prestige TV drama, it’s still quite different from the more action-packed series that had success in September. But none of these shows are guaranteed to maintain momentum for very long, certainly not in the same way that Rings of Power certainly will. Time will tell if October will be kind to series with a bent toward the grim and terrifying, or if the grim violence of House of the Dragon will do Watchworthy users just fine.
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.
