‘Monsters’ Did Not Open to Monstrous Viewership, but It Was Still #1

The premiere-week viewership numbers for Netflix’s “Monsters” weren’t particularly monstrous. They’re also not… “Monster”-ous.

In its first four days of availability, Ryan Murphy’s “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” amassed 12.3 million views, according to Netflix. Within its first five days, Season 1 — the “Monster: Jeffrey Dahmer” season — was streamed for a total of 196.2 million hours.

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These are, of course, two different metrics — Netflix shifted from reporting viewership hours to views sometime between these two seasons of TV. Not helpful. Math, here we come!

First, we’ll need some additional data points. “Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” (yes, that was the official title) was a 10-episode season that totals 8 hours and 46 minutes of runtime. “Menendez” is shorter: 7 hours and 54 minutes over nine episodes.

Netflix’s own basic math to compute a “View” (Total Time Viewed/Runtime) gives us more than 22 million views for “Dahmer” Week 1. Divide that number by the number of days available — that’s (again) five for “Dahmer” — and you’re looking at about 4.5 million views per day.

Applying a similar reverse-engineering to the “Menendez” season gets us to 97.2 million hours viewed in Week 1, or less than half what “Dahmer” had. “Menendez” had a bit more than 3 million views per day.

In other words, “Dahmer” was a monster (at the time, it was Netflix’s biggest series debut on record) and the “Menendez” start is just… good.

More proof: In just the last month or so, the debut weeks for Netflix’s “The Perfect Couple” (20.3 million views) and “Emily in Paris” Season 4 (19.9 million views) had bigger opening weeks than “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story.” As a matter of fact, their second weeks both had more views than “Monsters” did in its first week. And they were the number 2 and 3 shows on Netflix last week — see the full top 10 below.

English TV Top 10

1. Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story

2. The Perfect Couple: Limited Series

3. Emily in Paris: Season 4

4. Prison Break: Season 1

5. Prison Break: Season 2

6. Prison Break: Season 3

7. KAOS

8. CoComelon: Season 11

9. Selling Sunset: Season 8

10. Worst Ex Ever: Season 1

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