With many hunkered down with their TVs on during Thanksgiving, the holiday paved the way for several record-breaking ratings winners, from the stacked NFL lineup to the long-awaited premiere of “Stranger Things 5.”
“Stranger Things” kicked off the holiday with the debut of Volume 1, the first four episodes of the fifth and final season, which dropped Wednesday evening on Netflix, returning more than three years since the conclusion of Season 4. Volume 1 debut scored the biggest premiere week for an English-language show on Netflix ever with a whopping 59.6 million views in five days.
The massive viewership for “Stranger Things” ranges from four to six times the typical numbers for the streamer’s most-watched show of the week and outpaced its closest rival, “Wednesday,” which debuted the first part of its second season to 50 million views in August. Notably, debut numbers for “Stranger Things 5” were just shy of the “Squid Game” Season 3 drop, which scored 60.1 million views in June — though the gap was bigger from the “Squid Game” Season 2 debut last December, which scored 68 million views. “Squid Game” isn’t the best comparison, however, given that the Korean drama dropped full seasons upon release while “Stranger Things” is splitting up its final installment into three parts.
It’s also not an apples-to-apples comparison from “Stranger Things 4,” as the season first debuted seven episodes — as compared to four episodes in Volume 1 — and before Netflix updated its key viewership metric from hours viewed to views. That said, the 284.2 million hours viewed for the Season 5 premiere rivaled the 286.79 million hours logged during the opening weekend for Season 4.
With less than a week on the streamer, “Stranger Things 5” is more than halfway to joining the ranks of Netflix’s most-watched English language shows of all time, with the threshold being around 98.2 million views to get onto the list — the viewership logged by No. 10 TV show “Fool Me Once” — which seems more than doable for the tentpole series in just a week or two. And with Volume 2 set for release on Christmas Day and the finale premiering New Year’s Eve, the season’s viewership figures will only go up from here.
Thanksgiving Day saw several ratings wins as well, beginning with the first festivity of the day: the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. After reaching its biggest audience yet in 2024, the annual parade grew further to reach 34.3 million viewers across NBC and Peacock this year, an 8% increase over last year in total viewers and 13% in the key demo. Next up was the National Dog Show, which grew its viewership by 4% from last year to score 12.8 million viewers.
By the afternoon, the ratings star was the NFL, which featured two rivalry games — the Green Bay Packers against the Detroit Lions and the Cincinnati Bengals against the Baltimore Ravens — as well the matchup between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Dallas Cowboys. The Packers-Lions matchup became the most-watched early Thanksgiving Day game on record with 47.7 million viewers on Fox and other streaming platforms, including Tubi. The game marked Fox’s most-watched regular season game ever, and was also the most-streamed NFL Thanksgiving Day game and regular season game across all Fox streaming platforms.
Chiefs-Cowboys continued to break records as it scored a historic 57.23 million viewers, becoming the most-watched regular season game in NFL history. The viewership soared past its predecessors, up 47% compared to last year’s comparable Chiefs-Cowboys game and up 36% from the previous NFL record held by the 2022 Giants-Cowboys game, which scored 42.06 million viewers. Similar to the Packers-Lions game, the Chiefs-Cowboys game was the most-streamed NFL regular season game ever on Paramount+.
Lastly, the Bengals-Ravens matchup kept the trend strong as the most-watched NFL Thanksgiving night game ever with 28.4 million viewers across NBC, Peacock and Telemundo.
And it wasn’t just football that scored big ratings on Thanksgiving, with the CBS Sports Thanksgiving Classic between Duke and Arkansas becoming the most-watched regular season college basketball game on any network since the 1992-1993 season. The game scored 6.81 million viewers, soaring 32% over last year’s Thanksgiving game.
Another notable TV debut during the week of Thanksgiving was “Heated Rivalry,” which prompted a fair amount of buzz on social media. While HBO Max does not share streaming-only viewership data, we’re anticipating it hitting the Nielsen streaming charts when those numbers are available in several weeks.
