To get an early glimpse of how original series are performing across all the leading streaming services, Luminate Streaming Viewership (M) now offers complete data for the first quarter of 2025 (Jan. 1 – March 31). Using SV(M)’s new Ranking Report functionality enables subscribers to compare cohorts of original and acquired streaming content across customizable timeframes.
Using this tool, we generated the top 20 scripted drama series from Q1 2025.
Though it may not enjoy the buzz of other Q1 breakouts like the Apple TV+ series Severance, Landman, from co-creator Taylor Sheridan, absolutely dominated in viewership.
The Paramount+ drama outranked the No. 2 show, Netflix’s The Night Agent, by a margin of nearly 4 billion minutes streamed.
That’s all the more impressive considering Landman dropped its season finale on Jan. 12, with the bulk of its episodes premiering in the previous quarter. That makes Landman the top drama for two consecutive quarters, having reached 9.9 billion minutes in Q4 2024.
Viewers evidently spent much of Q1 bingeing Landman, which continued to rank among the weekly top 10 shows until mid-March. Sheridan, the mastermind behind Yellowstone and its various spin-offs, has historically been the biggest viewership driver for Paramount+, but this is a massive success even by his standards.
Sheridan has five series in the top 20 this quarter. Notable is the appearance of season 5 of Yellowstone, which is streaming on Peacock in its entirety after the first half of the season premiered on Paramount Network in 2022. (The remainder of the season premiered in November 2024.) This bump is likely because all of season 5 was made available on Peacock on March 16.
How does Landman stack up against Sheridan’s other streaming series launches? It’s the biggest yet, as the chart below demonstrates, comparing the first six weeks of activity following the series premieres of Landman (11/17/24),Tulsa King (11/13/22) and Lioness (7/23/23).
The success of Landman is all the more remarkable considering Paramount+ has a significantly smaller subscriber base than Netflix. The same is true for Severance, which posted a strong return to Apple TV+ in Q1 2025. Not only is season 2, which premiered on January 17 after an absence of almost three years, at No. 12 for the quarter, it also elevated the first season to No. 19.
Netflix has nine slots in the top 20. Season 2 of Squid Game delivered, but the highest ranking drama on the leading streaming service in Q1 was The Night Agent season 2. And like Severance, season 2 drove viewers to the first season.
However, there’s a powerful case to be made for another Netflix series, Adolescence, as the streaming service’s true champion for the quarter, when looked at through a different Luminate metric: views.
Since premiering March 13, this four-episode limited series amassed 17.3 million views in only five weeks. In contrast, the first five weeks for the 10-episode season 2 of The Night Agent amassed an average of 13.4 million views.
The views metric removes the bias of total minutes watched by dividing minutes by content duration. This enables comparisons between series with vastly different runtimes.
By any measure, Adolescence is a bona fide phenomenon, having recently been ranked by Netflix’s own metric as the fourth-most-watched English-language series ever on the streaming service.
There are many more stories to tell from the quarter, including the breakout of The Pitt on Max, which came in at No. 11. The number of successful multi-season series is a positive sign for the health of the TV business this year. Subscribe to Luminate SV(M) to access the full top 50 ranking report, as well as daily and weekly viewership data.
