‘Shogun’ Slays The Competition at No. 1 on Streaming Top 10

The FX and Hulu epic series “Shōgun,” based on James Clavell’s celebrated 1975 novel, slayed streaming competition this week to hand Hulu its first No. 1 slot in the Samba TV Weekly Wrap for the week of Feb. 26 to March 3.  

The first episode of the initial three-episode drop of the much-anticipated series was watched by a 1.8 million U.S. households over its first six days. Helping give the series its bump were baby boomers, with the demographic over-indexing above the national average by 15%. 

Making up the rest of the Top 10, two streamers broke through Netflix’s hold: Max’s splash debut of the “Aquaman” sequel “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” at No. 5 and Apple TV+’s new hit “Masters of the Air” landing back on the charts at No. 8 after falling off last week.

The top three from last week made up the rest of the top five this week. Notably, the hugely buzzed about live-action first season of “Avatar: The Last Airbender” bumped out Season 6 of “Love is Blind” to come in at No. 2, landing “Love is Blind” in No. 3, followed by Tyler Perry’s “Mea Culpa” in No. 4.

Making up the bottom half of this week’s top 10 was the sequel “Code 8: Part II” in sixth, “American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders” in seventh, Season 1 of SyFy’s “Resident Alien” dropping from No. 5 to No. 8, and the Adam Sandler and Carey Mulligan movie “Spaceman” at No. 10. 

For this week’s linear rankings, ABC dominated with five of the Top 10 spots, led by reality and game show stalwarts “American Idol” with the No. 2 and No. 4 spots, “Wheel of Fortune” in No. 6 and No. 8, and “The Bachelor” in No. 7.

Meanwhile, NBC’s “The Voice” sang its way to the first and third slots this week. Scripted programming made up just three of the Top 10, with NBC’s “Chicago Med” taking its place in fifth, and CBS’s “The Equalizer” and “FBI” coming in at No. 9 and No. 10 respectively.

Cole Strain is VP and Head of R&D at Samba TV, a WrapPRO partner. Click here for more data and analysis from Samba TV. 

The Wrap Report provides an exclusive first look at the most watched movies and TV series from the past week across both streaming and linear television sourced from viewership trends collected from Samba TV’s panel of more than 3 million households, balanced to the U.S. Census.