What to make of Hulu and Max’s popularity rankings and the battle over data transparency
LA TimesWelcome to the Wide Shot, a newsletter about the business of entertainment. As the lists exist now, they do not offer a solution to the problem of “data transparency,” which is at the heart of a long battle writers and actors have waged against entertainment conglomerates in their quest to get paid more for the hits with which they’re involved, a debate my colleague Wendy Lee wrote about in depth last week. In the pecking order of streaming data sets, daily Top 10 lists sit somewhere between raw viewership numbers and the streaming era’s pervasive “not much context, just vibes” school of statistics. But there’s nothing quite like real numbers to explain why a show like HBO’s “Winning Time,” which has dominated much of my social media feed despite mixed reviews, would be canceled after two seasons, particularly after ending with an episode in which the heroes, the Los Angeles Lakers, lose to the Boston Celtics in the 1984 NBA finals. Season 2 episodes of “Winning Time” were averaging 3.7 million viewers across Warner Bros. Discovery’s platforms, down about 33% from the 5.5 million who watched Season 1.
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