STRANGER THINGS: SEASON 5. Jamie Campbell Bower as Henry Creel in Stranger Things: Season 5. Cr. COURTESY OF NETFLIX © 2025
Stranger Things has returned to reclaim its throne, and it has done so by obliterating its own records. The latest Nielsen Top 10 report, covering United States TV viewing for the week of November 24th, shows that Stranger Things has set a new historic benchmark for streaming viewership.
Following the release of the first four episodes of Season 5 on Wednesday, November 26, the juggernaut show, which most importantly broke a Netflix record, generated a staggering 8.46 billion viewing minutes during the Thanksgiving week window. That equates to 140 million hours, and given the window, it took just three days (or a bit less, considering the “primetime” release).
As we reported when Netflix’s official figures were released, season 5 volume 1 generated 284.2M global viewing hours from November 23rd to the 30th, which equates to 59.6M views.
To put this number into perspective, Stranger Things didn’t just break the previous Nielsen record; it smashed it by over 1 billion minutes.
Fittingly, the previous record holder for the biggest weekly viewing total was also Stranger Things. The show previously captured 7.2 billion minutes during the week of May 30–June 5, 2022, following the release of Season 4.
Important: According to the Nielsen data, the four new episodes of Season 5 represented 57% of the total 8.46 billion minutes watched this week. That means the remaining percentage were people watching or rewatching prior seasons.
The show also dominated the key demographic, with 59% of viewers falling into the adults 18–49 category—the largest percentage for that demographic across all Top 10 titles for the week.
STRANGER THINGS: SEASON 5. (L to R) Noah Schnapp as Will Byers, Finn Wolfhard as Mike Wheeler, and Winona Ryder as Joyce Byers in Stranger Things: Season 5. Cr. COURTESY OF NETFLIX © 2025
The Build-Up to Season 5
Nielsen data tracks a clear trajectory of “rewatch” fever leading up to the Season 5 premiere, with this being the eighth consecutive week with the series reportedly “one of the few streaming titles that over-indexes the TV population among teens.”
Even in the three weeks before new episodes dropped, the past seasons were dominating the charts:
- Week of Nov. 3: #3 overall (921 million minutes)
- Week of Nov. 10: #1 overall (1.345 billion minutes)
- Week of Nov. 17: #1 overall (1.683 billion minutes)
The full top 10 for the week of November 24th through November 30th was as follows, with Landman from Paramount+ coming in a distant second and Netflix’s The Beast in Me in third.
More data from Nielsen can be found on the official Nielsen top 10 website.
