Two of Netflix‘s star series returned this month, but audiences have been slow to catch on. Both Beef and Running Point both debuted their second seasons over the past two weeks or so to pretty middling results.
Beef, which debuted on April 16, managed 4.1M views in its first full week on the streamer, boosting it to No. 3 on the global English TV Top 10 from April 20 to 26. That’s up 70% from its debut weekend, signaling that Season 2 is at least generating a little bit of momentum, but the raw numbers aren’t looking great.
Season 2 launched to just over 2M views in its first four days, down nearly 60% from Season 1’s premiere weekend, to land at No. 7 on the weekly rankings.
The first season debuted to roughly 5.8M views in its first few days and peaked the next week with 12M views, so there’s a clear and significant audience drop off between seasons that the series is unlikely to completely close the gap on — even if Season 2 has in fact captured some momentum.
Running Point is not faring much better. Season 2 put up 5.3M views in its opening weekend, down 43% from the 9.3M views that Season 1 managed in the same timeframe. The second season’s performance was still enough to get it to second place on the English TV list, but it was far below the leader, a British psychological thriller called Unchosen (which got 10.4M views).
These are not isolated instances and, in fact, many of Netflix’s popular series have been struggling more and more to retain audiences across seasons. Bridgerton‘s audience declined for Season 4. The Witcher also didn’t generate much buzz upon its recent return, and Nobody Wants This saw a much smaller but still notable audience decline for its second season as well.
Small audience declines are expected season-over-season for most series across both network TV and streaming, and anything under a 20% reduction is unlikely to sound any alarms over at Netflix. A 40-60% decline, though, is another story. Neither Beef nor Running Point have been renewed for a Season 3 yet.
Speaking of renewals, Stranger Things: Tales From ’85 did manage to score a renewal on Tuesday coming off its first weekend on the streamer. The animated spinoff took home 2.8M views and landed at No. 7 on the English TV list.
