Last week came the surprising news that Netflix's You season 4 part 1 had defeated The Last of Us in the streaming charts. Now Nielsen has released their batch of data for the next week of viewing and an even more shocking thing has been revealed, The Last of Us actually went down in viewers. According to Nielsen's latest metrics, which measures the week of February 13th through the 19th, The Last of Us was the #4 most watched show on streaming with 943 million minutes watched. Compared to the week prior, The Last of Us was the #3 streaming TV show and was watched 1.109 billion minutes.
Now, this does not necessarily mean that The Last of Us isn't as popular as one might have thought, quite the contrary. There's actually a very solid explanation for why the HBO hit's viewership went down week over week. Last week's data from Nielsen, covering the week of February 6th to 12th, was the one week in the entire run of The Last of Us when the episode premiered early. So as not to compete with the Super Bowl that Sunday, HBO released the show early on streaming that Friday, which elevated its viewership by a sizeable margin.
Naturally it's also worth reiterating that Nielsen's data comes exclusively from streaming on televisions. That means it doesn't count computers or mobile devices in its numbers, it also doesn't tally the linear cable viewers in the same charts. Knowing that, these numbers for The Last of Us are exclusively for its viewership on HBO Max and not HBO subscribers on cable. According to a press release from HBO, the viewership for The Last of Us episodes 4, 5, and 6 looked like this:
Episode 4 – 7.5 million (Feb. 5)
Episode 5 – 11.6 million (Feb. 10-Feb. 12)* *Early premiere, includes data from Friday to Sunday
Episode 6 – 7.8 million (Feb. 19)
Ever since The Last of Us premiered on HBO it has shown remarkable, even record setting, viewership. Episode 9, the season one finale of the series, had 8.2 million viewers, an increase of 74% compared to the series premiere just weeks prior. You can find the Top 10 most streamed movies and shows according to Nielsen below.
