New Nielsen TV Ratings Show Prime Video’s The Wheel Of Time Continued To Bleed Viewers

John F. Trent |

Jan 13, 2022

The Wheel of Time - Episode 108 Credit: Jan Thijs Copyright: © 2021 Amazon Content Services LLC and Sony Pictures Television Inc. Description: Pictured (L-R): Fares Fares (The Dark One), Josha Stradowski (Rand al’Thor), Rosamund Pike (Moiraine Damodred) Air Date: December 24, 2021

The latest Nielsen numbers from Prime Video’s live-action adaptation of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time from showrunner Rafe Judkins continue to show that the series is bleeding viewers.

When the show first premiered during the week ending November 21st, the show was second on Nielsen’s streaming chart, which tracks TV viewers in the United States, having been viewed a total of 1.163 billion minutes. That’s 19.38 million hours viewed. However, the show released its first three episodes in its first week.

So, if you divide that number by 3, you get an average of 6.46 million per episode, and that’s probably around the same number that tuned in given each episode is about an hour in length.

Wheel of Time was only best by Netflix’s Red Notice, which Nielsen reports had 1.843 billion minutes viewed.

In the show’s second week those viewing numbers would drastically decline as it fell to 6th overall on the charts with only 663 million minutes viewed. That’s 11.05 million hours viewed.

As noted above, the drastic decrease is more than likely due to the fact that the first three episodes were released during its opening week, and only the fourth episode was released during its second week.

In it’s third week, the show continued to tumble down the charts. Nielsen reports that the week ending December 5th the show placed 8th with only 537 million minutes viewed. That’s 8.95 million hours viewed.

Now, the most recent chart sees the show moving up to 7th on the Nielsen chart. However, its total minutes viewed dropped by almost 30 million minutes viewed.

Nielsen reports that following the release of the sixth episode of the show, The Wheel of Time only had 509 million minutes viewed or around 8.5 million hours viewed. The decrease in total minutes also comes as the sixth episode was 2 minutes longer than the fifth episode. The runtime for “The Flame of Tar Valon” is one hour and two minutes, while “Blood Calls Blood” is an even hour.

Interestingly, that 8.5 million hours viewed number wouldn’t even rank on Netflix’s Top 10 English-speaking TV series for the week ending December 12th. The least viewed show in Netflix’s Top 10 for that week was Selling Sunset: Season 4 which had 11.1 million hours viewed.

However, Netflix does drop all episodes of their television shows at once rather than release them weekly. Still, there were six episodes of The Wheel of Time to watch, and Nielsen’s data does not segment out which episode of the show viewers are watching.

While it appears The Wheel of Time is bleeding viewers week over week, it’s likely those numbers are still very good.

Amazon Studios chief Jennifer Salke told Deadline at the end of November, “We can firmly say that Wheel of Time was the most watched series premiere of the year and one of the Top 5 series launches of all time for Prime Video.”

Salke added that “there were tens and tens of millions of streams” across the globe with the top countries watching the show being the United States, India, Brazil, Canada, France, and Germany.

“It’s definitely trending to exceed our expectations which were high,” she also noted.

In fact, if you add up the total hours based on Nielsen’s data it comes to around 47.88 million hours viewed. If you divide that by six you get an average of 7.98 hours per episode. That is better than all of the network cable shows.

The highest average network cable show by viewership is NCIS on CBS with 7.591 million viewers.

So, while The Wheel of Time might be bleeding viewership, it is still performing very well. Whether that performance in its first season will lead to success in its second season, time will tell.

The show has a rather ho-hum user score on IMDb with a 7.2 out of 10 rating from almost 76,000 IMDb users. Females appear to like the show significantly more than males albeit there are significantly more male ratings compared to females. There does not appear to be any discrepancy among different age groups.