The internet is mildly abuzz with an incorrect assessment. Fallout’s first-week viewership figures for its second season have been revealed, courtesy of a predictable appearance in the top 10 streaming originals category, and they’re a heck of a lot smaller than what we saw for the first week of the season one premiere. This bodes ill! Something went wrong! It was just a fad!
No, no, and probably not, respectively. There’s an incredibly important bit of context here that certain bad-faith sorts may inevitably gloss over. I’m not even a huge fan of the show, personally, but that’s nonsense, and it’s worth setting the record straight before things blow out of proportion. Not that I think a ton of people are going to click on something that I’ve written, but I’m doing my small part.
Context, People, Context!
For just about as long as streaming has existed as television’s dominant force, folks have argued over whether a binge model (which is to say, dropping every episode in a season all at once) or a weekly model (the traditional approach, which some view as outdated) is preferable. Many prefer the former; my old bones enjoy the latter.
The belief that weekly drops only exist to push people to stay subscribed for a longer period of time is, in my view, somewhat unfair. That definitely factors, but having a week to digest each episode is quite nice, and avoiding full-season spoilers like internet landmines is fantastic.
There’s a reason for this tangent: Fallout’s first season took the binge approach, but its currently-airing second season is weekly. Nielsen, the decades-running ratings tracking company that informed network and cable enthusiasts about how well their favourite shows performed since basically forever, has taken to tracking streaming, too. And Fallout, in its 2024 debut week, racked up an incredible 2.9 billion minutes of combined viewing. What about the season two debut week? 794 minutes.
The Hollywood Reporter has the right of it, however. It’s an apples-and-oranges comparison. People binged the heck out of season one, and they did so to the tune of nearly three billion minutes. Fallout’s second-season premiere was about a single episode. And, while plenty of those minutes were committed to catching up on season one, the fact remains that there was, quite literally, one-eighth as much new content to watch this time around. That it’s as high as a quarter of its predecessor speaks volumes to the stability of the series.
We even have the details:
“Nearly 800 million minutes of viewing is still a healthy number, and Nielsen says the season two premiere accounted for 54 percent (about 429 million) of the total — suggesting that had Prime Video released more episodes on Dec. 16, the number would be considerably higher. The remainder came from season one, as Nielsen counts viewing for all seasons of a series in its streaming rankings.” -The Hollywood Reporter
I could go on, but I’m sure you get the point. 794 million minutes isn’t a sign of failure. It’s a reassurance that Prime Video’s sensation remains sensational. Don’t let those clickbait vids tell you otherwise. We’ll monitor the show’s performance throughout the remainder of the season as those numbers come in, of course, but as of now? Peachy.
If The Metacritic Score Wasn’t Enough, Now People Are Bidding Over $1,000 For A Copy Of Cory In The House
Shoutout to the person who bought a CIB copy for $30 roughly 36 hours ago.
