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In its first three days on Netflix, Matt Groening’s Disenchantment averaged just over two million viewers and a 1.4 rating among adults 18-49, according Nielsen’s SVOD Content Ratings.
These results are interesting to the TV community because the actual performance of shows on Netflix has been heretofore opaque, but Nielsen is trying to shine some light on how these streaming shows are doing, especially in comparison to traditional linear TV.
The animated series from the creator of The Simpsons tells the story of Princess Bean (Abbi Jacobson) and her companions Elfo the Elf (Nat Faxon) and Luci the Personal Demon (Eric Andre) as Bean tries to escape her fate and resists marrying the man that her father has chosen for her in an attempt to expand his kingdom.
Nielsen compared the show’s release to another of its younger-skewing series, the live-action Lost in Space. Both shows had similar overall initial viewing levels, the service said, and they both had similar male-skewing audiences.
However, Disenchantment’s median age, 29, was much lower than Lost in Space’s 43, and, indeed, lower than most of television, which tends to be the case for animation. Netflix offers other young-skewing shows, including 13 Reasons Why and Fuller House, both at 25, and Stranger Things at 30.
Disenchantment’s first episode, which dropped on Friday, Aug. 17, 2018, attracted an average minute audience, which aggregates the total number of people who watched the program for any period of 60 seconds or longer, of 4.4 million U.S. viewers, with 73 percent of that audience coming from the adult 18-49 demographic.
Over the show’s first weekend, the show’s total average minute audience across all ten episodes was nearly 2.1 million total viewers, with 75 percent of that group aged 18 to 49. As might be expected, viewership fell off sharply after the first episode, with episode ten’s average minute audience falling to 759,000 by the end of the weekend. That number is likely to improve with time as more people finish watching the entire first season.