Fallout returned to Prime Video last month, boosting the series back onto the Nielsen charts against some tough competition from fan-favorite streaming originals including Stranger Things and Landman — but how did the Season 2 debut truly stack up against the record-setting first installment?
The answer is more complicated than it might seem at first glance. Nielsen’s latest streaming report indicates that Fallout tallied 794M minutes viewed during the week of December 15 to 21 across all nine available episodes, including the first episode of Season 2, which hit Prime Video on December 16. That put it at No. 7 on Nielsen’s overall Top 10 streaming charts for that interval — much lower than the No. 1 spot that Season 1 claimed upon its release.
First and foremost, it’s important to note that all eight episodes of Season 1 were released simultaneously, while Season 2 is releasing weekly. That gave audiences the opportunity to binge the first season, which would naturally drive up the watch time in the first week. Per Nielsen, which doesn’t typically make distinctions between seasons in its weekly viewership reporting, 54% of the December 15 to 21 streaming total came from the new episode, which translates to roughly 429M minutes viewed.
There is truly no way to directly compare apples-to-apples since Amazon has not released any data of its own regarding the Season 2 premiere performance. Rough estimates show that there was a slight decline in viewership between seasons, but the extent is harder to say.
Season 1 generated 2.9B minutes viewed across all eight episodes in its first five days of availability, translating to about 580.2M minutes viewed per day. Assuming viewing across all episodes was equal, each episode averaged 72.5M minutes viewed per day. That is admittedly a large assumption, because it’s much more likely that viewership was somewhat front-loaded to the first half of the season. However, using the same assumptions for the Season 2 premiere, which was available for six days in its debut week (further complicating matters), the math lands around 71.46M minutes viewed per day.
This would be the best case scenario. For instance, if viewers watched six episodes on average the first week of Season 1, the number jumps to 82.9M per episode per day. Five episodes would take it up to 96.7M, making comparisons less favorable.
Sources indicate to Deadline that the Fallout Season 2 premiere, while likely not on par with and certainly not exceeding Season 1, did not fall off a cliff in terms of viewership, and the model-based estimations would seem to support that. Another tell that the numbers are down is simply that Prime Video did not tout the episode’s performance, as it typically does when its marquee series make season-over-season gains.
In terms of the Nielsen rankings, Fallout was bested in its debut week by Homeland (which got a boost thanks to its arrival on Netflix, as many series do), Emily in Paris, NCIS, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, Landman and Stranger Things.
Landman notched a fifth consecutive week of growth to tally 1.61B minutes viewed during this interval. It was bested only by Stranger Things‘ 2.3B, which is entirely unsurprising considering this was right in the middle of its final season’s run and it had already shattered Nielsen’s previous record for weekly viewership in its Season 5 premiere week.
In all, Landman racked up 7.7B viewing minutes in the six week period from its Season 2 premiere on November 16 through this period.
See more on the week of December 15 to 21 in streaming below.
Nellie Andreeva contributed to this report.
