'High Potential,' 'Squid Game' and 'Bluey' Bahareh Ritter/Disney; No Ju-han/Netflix; Disney+/Ludo Studio/Courtesy Everett Collection Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment Logo text The upper reaches of TV ratings charts don't tend to change much from week to week - or TV season to TV season. NFL games will just about always occupy the top slots from September through January, capped off by the biggest broadcast of the year in the Super Bowl. Tracker is on pace for a threepeat as the No. 1 scripted series on network TV. Netflix will have more entries in the streaming rankings most weeks than any other service, and sometimes more than all of them put together. Dig a little deeper, though, and there's a lot of interesting data to be found, like the still large audiences for network news, the unequaled streak of a kids' favorite and the halo effect of the NFL on Sunday night programming. Related Stories TV 'Stranger Things' Creators The Duffer Brothers Know What Viewers Want to See in Final Episodes TV Duffer Brothers' "Main" Note for 'Stranger Things' Demogorgon Costume Design: Make It Easy for a "Young Kid" to Draw Here are some hidden and forgotten numbers that shaped the TV and streaming landscape in 2025. 8 million (or more): The number of people who watch ABC's breakout hit High Potential on Hulu within a few weeks of an episode's first airing. The series gets about half of its audience from streaming, based on data from its first season (including the fourth quarter of 2024) and early episodes of season two. Its streaming viewership is the highest of any current network series. High Potential is as stark a reminder as any that even on broadcast TV, a show's first-night ratings are just a starting point. 18 million: The number of people who, on any given weeknight, tune into one of the three evening network newscasts. Led by ABC's World News Tonight - which averages about 7.8 million viewers - the three network shows outdraw every regular program on cable news. World News Tonight and NBC's Nightly News (6.16 million viewers so far this season) regularly rank in the top 20 among all network shows of the week, regardless of time of day, and the CBS Evening News (4 million) usually makes the top 40 in same-day ratings. 27.14 million: The U.S. audience for season two of Squid Game, based on five weeks of viewing as calculated by Nielsen. That's not so much a hidden number as one that has maybe been memory-holed a little - but it's a huge number. Squid Game has the largest five-week audience for any series, regardless of platform, this year - pending figures for the final season of Stranger Things (see below). 1.31 million, 111: Average same-day viewers and ranking among cable programs this season for the top show that isn't news or sports. Remember 10 or 15 years ago when cable shows like The Closer, Burn Notice and even Jersey Shore could count on 5 million or more viewers a week, and a big hit like The Walking Dead topped 10 million for seasons on end? Yeah, those days are well and truly gone. Yellowstone's final run on Paramount Network late last year averaged about 12 million viewers, and since then the bottom has fallen out. 163: Consecutive weeks (through Nov. 16) that Bluey has made Nielsen's top 10 streaming charts, the longest such run for any show in the five-plus years Nielsen has released weekly streaming data. The Disney+ kids' cartoon last fell outside the top 10 acquired series list in the week ending Oct. 2, 2022; a child born during the week that the streak began is probably watching Bluey right now. 12.5 million: Average primetime viewership for Fox in the week of Oct. 27-Nov. 2, the highest weekly mark for any network during the fall - i.e., not including Super Bowl or Olympics weeks - since 2018. That's almost entirely due to that week containing games three through seven of the World Series; those five telecasts averaged close to 17 million viewers, helping Fox score its most-watched World Series (15.71 million, including the two games that aired a week earlier) since 2017. 89: Percentage of White Lotus viewers who watched season three of the series on HBO Max. Mike White's anthology about wealthy Americans abroad and the murder-prone hotel chain they stay at averaged 11.59 million viewers over 35 days, according to Nielsen (and more than 16 million in HBO's longer measurement window), its biggest season to date. Only 1.26 million of those viewers watched on HBO's cable channel - a not uncommon split for shows on HBO. 1.93 billion: Viewing minutes for Love Island USA on Peacock from July 7-13, the week of its season six finale. The show grew substantially in 2024 but really broke out this year, scoring more than a billion minutes of watch time for five straight weeks - peaking with the finale - and s