Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham’s single-shot smash becomes the first non-terrestrial show to be the most-watched programme in the UK.
It’s an odd quirk of the current media ecosystem that we spend so much time talking about shows comparatively few people are watching.
In the week beginning 3rd March, according to the UK ratings boffins at Barb, no single streaming show broke into the top 50 shows across all broadcast channels and SVOD services in the UK. Over that week, fewer people watched the latest episode of Severance than Sunday night’s 10 o’clock news on BBC One (2.57m).
The most recent hit of ratings data then, covering the period of 10th-16th March, looks like something of a watershed moment. For the first time ever, the most-watched episode of TV in the UK was an SVOD-exclusive, as the first episode of Netflix’s Adolescence drew in an estimated 6.45m pairs of eyeballs – despite premiering halfway through the period in question. Its closest rival, BBC One’s The Apprentice, boasted 5.8m viewers.
For context, the most-watched streaming show of 2022, the Stranger Things season finale, was seen by just 4.95m UK viewers in its first seven days on Netflix. The next streaming offering to break into the top 50 the same week as Adolescence was the Disney+ debut of Moana 2 with 3m viewers.
Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham’s drama, currently Netflix’s number one show in 71 countries, has clearly hit a nerve. Like Mr Bates vs The Post Office before it, the show has been mentioned on hard news programmes and in the Houses of Parliament, sparking discussions over unregulated social media use amongst the nation’s kids in a way not at all dissimilar to ITV’s scandal-uncovering drama just over a year ago.
At the same time, Thorne has lamented the current funding crisis hitting the UK TV industry, warning that relying on streamers and international partners over the likes of the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 risks these unapologetically British offerings falling by the wayside.
“If [writers] are denied the opportunity to tell those stories, then the whole culture starts to crumble,” he told Deadline last week.
“Netflix making these shows is exciting, but it’s not everything.”
Adolescence is streaming on Netflix now.
