The MindShare Top 50
College football’s opening weekend takes No. 1 at 50.9: the biggest single entry on this chart since the World Cup final, and more than double everything else this week. Eighteen nationally televised windows from Thursday to Sunday summed 58.5 million average viewers, led by Wisconsin–Notre Dame at Lambeau Field (7.42 million on NBC, the week’s biggest audience on any network), Lane Kiffin’s LSU debut against Clemson (5.75 million on ABC, a weather delay pushing the finish past 1am), the Apple Cup at 5.14 million and Boise State’s near-upset of Oregon at 4.83 million on CBS. Last week’s Week 0 entry carried five windows and scored 24.2. This one carries eighteen and an est. 175.6M attention-hours, which is roughly what the whole rest of the top 10 adds up to. Spider-Man’s opening weekend in July scored 46.4. A Saturday of college football beat it without a single game over eight million viewers.
Below the football, Netflix had a documentary week, and baseball makes its debut. Death of the Pastor’s Wife holds No. 2 (20.2) on a second straight week atop the US TV list, Instadocs: The Decoy Plane is the week’s biggest new entry at No. 8, Turning Point: Generation 9/11 lands at No. 19, the Dan Markel docuseries Welcome to the Family at No. 20 on Hulu and Disney+ together, and Untold Raygun at No. 39. MLB’s national windows enter for the first time at No. 11 (15.3): five telecasts led by Brewers–Cubs on FOX at 2.52 million, scored exactly the way the football packages are. Olivia Rodrigo is the top music entry at No. 17 on 36.3 million US Spotify streams, with Ella Langley at No. 32 in her twenty-first week atop the Hot 100, one shy of the all-time record. Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen was the streaming premiere that was supposed to own the week and enters at No. 29, US No. 6 on Netflix in four days. Spider-Man re-enters at No. 40 on a sixth straight No. 1 weekend ($18.2 million, $918 million domestic, the all-time record now $19 million away), and Labor Day emptied late night: Kimmel, Fallon and Meyers all ran repeats, so Kimmel leaves the chart from No. 25 and Gutfeld! at No. 30 is the only original standing.
Three methodology changes land with this edition, all on the methodology page. Streaming titles are now scored on the days they were actually in a platform’s top 10 rather than needing four days to count, so Thursday drops like The Mandalorian and Grogu and Chad Powers score this week on their three days (both just miss the fifty). Music no longer takes a recency discount: an artist’s streams are measured fresh every week, so the number already falls when the audience moves on. And podcast hours now sit inside a band at the show’s rank instead of every show in a band getting the same figure. Live-event figures remain per-window Nielsen sums, each window capped at three hours; anything without a published US number does not chart, which this week includes the US Open’s first week.
Below the football, Netflix had a documentary week, and baseball makes its debut. Death of the Pastor’s Wife holds No. 2 (20.2) on a second straight week atop the US TV list, Instadocs: The Decoy Plane is the week’s biggest new entry at No. 8, Turning Point: Generation 9/11 lands at No. 19, the Dan Markel docuseries Welcome to the Family at No. 20 on Hulu and Disney+ together, and Untold Raygun at No. 39. MLB’s national windows enter for the first time at No. 11 (15.3): five telecasts led by Brewers–Cubs on FOX at 2.52 million, scored exactly the way the football packages are. Olivia Rodrigo is the top music entry at No. 17 on 36.3 million US Spotify streams, with Ella Langley at No. 32 in her twenty-first week atop the Hot 100, one shy of the all-time record. Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen was the streaming premiere that was supposed to own the week and enters at No. 29, US No. 6 on Netflix in four days. Spider-Man re-enters at No. 40 on a sixth straight No. 1 weekend ($18.2 million, $918 million domestic, the all-time record now $19 million away), and Labor Day emptied late night: Kimmel, Fallon and Meyers all ran repeats, so Kimmel leaves the chart from No. 25 and Gutfeld! at No. 30 is the only original standing.
Three methodology changes land with this edition, all on the methodology page. Streaming titles are now scored on the days they were actually in a platform’s top 10 rather than needing four days to count, so Thursday drops like The Mandalorian and Grogu and Chad Powers score this week on their three days (both just miss the fifty). Music no longer takes a recency discount: an artist’s streams are measured fresh every week, so the number already falls when the audience moves on. And podcast hours now sit inside a band at the show’s rank instead of every show in a band getting the same figure. Live-event figures remain per-window Nielsen sums, each window capped at three hours; anything without a published US number does not chart, which this week includes the US Open’s first week.