While Wednesday season 2 did land some big initial numbers on par with the premiere of the first season, over time, things have begun to slip a bit.
Wednesday did keep the #1 spot on Netflix the week of August 11-17 with 29.1 million views, a 42% drop from the previous week of 50 million views. Meanwhile, while Wednesday season 1 also started with 50 million views, it jumped to 60.3 million views the week after when word-of-mouth started to spread, and the show snowballed into being a huge hit.
This is not a great start if Wednesday wants to be on a path to have season 2 viewership pass season 1. Usually with Netflix’s biggest hits we see growth over time, as has happened with series like Stranger Things, Bridgerton and Money Heist, where their later seasons are their most-viewed.
There is, of course, a difference here, that being the fact that Netflix has annoyingly split season 2 of Wednesday into two parts, with the second airing on September 3, a month after the first. That will obviously increase its total numbers, but it stands to reason there will be a more significant drop-off for the second half compared to if it had just released all at once like its entire audience would prefer. The only entity this benefits is Netflix, as they retain two months of subscribership rather than people signing up and cancelling over the course of a weekend. No one wants to watch four episodes, wait exactly a month, then watch four more episodes.
There are other reasons that enthusiasm might be muted for Wednesday season 2. The first and most obvious is the genuinely absurd three year wait for eight more episodes of a show that in no way should take that long to make. It could build anticipation sure, but it could also just make people lose interest.
Fans also haven’t loved where Wednesday season 2 has gone where (spoilers) characters like Enid are sidelined and put into annoying love triangles and now apparently Tyler, season 1’s villain, is also going to be the main bad guy of the rest of season 2, according to the midseason finale and the trailers the show has released. At least for now, the other “crow” villain mystery seems to have been resolved in short order. Again, I think the plot needing to be structure so that episode 4 is some big climax because of the break hurts the series.
I am not shocked that Wednesday season 2 is performing worse than season 1. There is going to be one big change going forward in that production is starting on season 3 in November. That indicates the gap will be around 1.5 years this time rather than 3 between seasons. Now, take the next step and don’t cut it in half.
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