Earlier this year, Luminate Streaming Watch examined the effects of long season-to-season gaps on TV series viewership, noting that a lengthy absence can lead to a significant ratings boost for the most popular titles.
This phenomenon has played out again with perhaps the biggest streaming release of 2025: the fifth and final season of Stranger Things.
While the blockbuster Netflix series has rolled out only the first half of its final run (three more episodes drop Christmas Day, followed by the finale on Dec. 31), this season is already drawing a larger audience than the previous one, which dominated the Netflix charts back in summer 2022.
Across season 5’s first three days of availability, the new episodes racked up nearly 10 million total estimated views (total minutes streamed divided by total runtime), up almost 30% from the 7.8 million views season 4 received in its equivalent window. Even with its already mammoth popularity, Stranger Things evidently still had room to grow, though the new season’s week-to-week drop-off in viewership should be watched closely.
Stranger Things also achieved the ultimate coup for a streaming hit: bringing old episodes back into viewers’ rotation. After the three-year-plus wait for the fifth season, many fans must have needed to refresh their memories, as S4 was streamed for more than 1 billion minutes in the two weeks leading up to the S5 premiere.
In fact, according to Luminate Streaming Viewership (M), even in the new season’s first full week of availability, all four previous installments ranked among the most-streamed original TV seasons by viewing time, with only S3 charting outside the top 10. As Stranger Things moves toward its conclusion, the series remains as popular as ever, if not more — success its long absence seems to have helped fuel.
However, November’s other big returning series shows that a lengthy hiatus is not the only road to success.
The Paramount+ smash Landman returned on Nov. 16, almost exactly a year after its debut, and is putting up numbers that rival Stranger Things for audience size. In just one week of availability, Landman’s season premiere received 17.5 million estimated U.S. views, more than any individual episode of Stranger Things in season 5’s first week on Netflix, per Luminate SV(M).
Of course, viewing time is the ultimate currency in streaming these days, and on that front Stranger Things has Landman beat in the aggregate (thanks at least partly to the former’s supersize episode runtimes).
But the Paramount+ series is keeping the competition surprisingly close, at least for now; Stranger Things’ two-hour series finale, sure to draw a massive audience, will likely put it over the top in the end (even with 500+ movie theaters screening the finale).
Still, Landman’s success shows a regular release cadence remains a worthwhile strategy. As SVODs strive to keep engagement levels up, hit series that can roll out on an annual schedule may be the most valuable commodities in the streaming market.
