Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a member of the cast or crew of Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy. Say what you like about the sometimes inconsistent merits of the comic book show, but it’s pretty clear that all involved busted their asses to make something undeniably energetic as the series smashed through its final season last month. Now, you’ve gotten to that finish line, turned to your streamer to ask how you did, and been told: “You did good! Just not, uh, Prison Break good.”
This is per Deadline, reporting on Nielsen’s latest streaming ratings report, which confirms that, yes, the story of Michael Scofield, tattooed prison breaker, was the top performer for the week of August 5 (the most recent week data is available for), with the 90-episode series (which aired from 2005 to 2009, along with a finale movie and a revival season in 2017) accruing 1.6 billion minutes of viewership during the week. That beat out Umbrella Academy, the final season of which also debuted that week, and which logged 1.45 billion minutes. (Bluey came in third; Bluey will outlive us all, which is probably for the best.)
As always with numbers like this, you do have to take things like episode count into, well, account: People were presumably bingeing Prison Break, which has been absent from Netflix’s servers for the last 7 years, while they were probably only watching the most recent season of Umbrella. But it’s still a clear example of the hold licensed legacy content can have when it hits Netflix. (The real loser here, meanwhile, might be Hulu, which has been hosting Prison Break for years, but without anything like this sudden influx of watchers.) We’re not quite at Suits levels of viewership, admittedly, but it’s still the latest example of the situation where people genuinely want to spend more time watching a show that aired 19 years ago than the newest material to come out.
Prison Break starred Wentworth Miller and Dominic Purcell as two brothers who just could not keep themselves out of prison, despite basically breaking out of one per season; running on Fox back in the day, the show was a hit in its first season, even as it slowly bled viewers over the years as its premise got ever-more implausible. Its 2017 revival (which featured, among other things, a magic hand transplant and a LOT of talk about ISIL) could never quite match the zeitgeist-y grabbing nature of the original show, and lasted for just 9 episodes on Fox. A new series, which would air on Hulu, is supposedly in the works.
Umbrella Academy can at least take muted solace in the fact that it was one of only two streaming originals to crack the top 10 for the week its finale aired; everything else was licensed content, except for House Of The Dragon (at 935 million minutes) which splits its viewership with HBO proper.