How Law & Order: SVU is increasing popularity through streaming
Even though the NBC series is losing what few seasons it had on Netflix, Hulu has revealed (per IndieWire) that the Mariska Hargitay drama series is actually the #1 drama series streamed on their service in 2017. That was enough for SVU to edge out NBC’s mega-hit This Is Us and then also The Handmaid’s Tale, otherwise known as the show that has been completely dominating awards season.
The significance of SVU building up more of a viewership through streaming cannot be stated enough. While the series doesn’t necessarily need to build up more of a viewership, this serves as a nice shield for the series to be able to ensure that viewing patterns continue to go in the right direction and it doesn’t suffer any significant slips over time.
One of the only reasons why you don’t tend to hear even more information in regards to some of this streaming data is due to the simple fact that Hulu doesn’t exactly reveal many of their viewership numbers. They don’t really allow for much of an opportunity for you to know more about the show’s performance, and as a result of this it’s a little bit easier to get caught up slowly by how the show is performing with some of its live+same-day numbers when that’s just a smaller piece of the pie.
Given that SVU’s new showrunner Michael Chernuchin said recently that he wants to see the show break the record of the original series and make it to season 21, these streaming numbers are more valuable than we can say. Based on the current trajectory, the series could get there if the numbers continue to move forward in this sort of positive direction.
(Photo: NBC.)