Stranger Things Season 4 has been a record-breaking success for Netflix, with the first portion of the current season having the most hours watched in a weekend premiere for a streaming series at a staggering 286.79 million. Volume 2 of the season continued this massive success with its premiere this morning leading to Netflix crashing and being inaccessible to many of its users with reports of problems with Netflix reaching over 13,000 in the early Friday morning. Now, we know that the series has once again broken a record, with Stranger Things Season 4 setting a new Nielsen Streaming record for most viewing time for a week.
For the week of May 30-June 5, Stranger Things saw a total of 7.2 billion minutes of viewing time according to Nielsen. This is the highest weekly total of any streaming title since the weekly ranking's inception in 2020. This continues the fourth season's record-breaking streak as it also holds the biggest two-week tally for any streaming show for the weeks of May 23-29 and May 30-June 5, bringing in a two-week total of 12.34 billion viewing minutes. It is also important to note that Nielsen’s streaming ratings only cover the viewing minutes on TV sets and only measures U.S. audiences, so the time that people spent watching the series on either computers or mobile devices, as well as the viewers from outside the US, were not counted in the Nielsen rating.
There has been no streaming show to ever cross the 6 billion Nielsen viewing minutes mark in a single week, so Stranger Things blowing past that milestone and surpassing the 7 billion mark is that much more impressive. The only other series that were able to reach that 5 billion minutes mark were Tiger King (which reached the milestone twice) and Ozark during the middle of the COVID-19 lockdowns in Spring 2020.
Alongside Stranger Things in the May 30-June 5 viewing top 10 for original streaming series, provided by The Hollywood Reporter, there is fellow Netflix series The Lincoln Lawyer (966 million), the previously mentioned Ozark (644 million), Wrong Side of the Tracks (291 million), Grace and Frankie (271 million), Workin’ Moms (215 million), and Floor Is Lava (214 million). Joining these Netflix series were Disney+'s Obi-Wan Kenobi at a total of 958 million minutes as well as The Boys and Night Sky at Prime Video, both garnering 919 million minutes and 242 million minutes, respectively.