Landman Ratings SHOCK! Season 2 Premiere: Did It Beat Season 1?!

Paramount Global is singing a happy tune about the second season launch of "Landman," the Taylor Sheridan-helmed series. They're claiming a whopping 9.2 million "streaming views" in the first two days after the premiere. Now, before you get too excited, let's unpack what "streaming views" actually means these days. It’s basically minutes viewed divided by the runtime, a metric popularized by Netflix and now increasingly common across the streaming landscape.

Landman Ratings SHOCK! Season 2 Premiere: Did It B...

The streamer is touting this as a 262% increase over the Season 1 premiere, and potentially the most-watched premiere for any original series on Paramount+. Sounds impressive, right? Well, here's where it gets a little murky. We don’t have access to comparable publicly available data from Season 1, because Paramount didn't release two-day streaming viewership back then. It seems they've also tweaked their audience metrics. I recall Deadline reporting 5.2 million same-day viewers for the Season 1 debut across streaming and traditional TV, but those numbers were a mix of internal data and VideoAmp metrics.

Here's the kicker: Season 1 had a simulcast on Paramount Network, while Season 2 is streaming-exclusive. This means Paramount ditched the VideoAmp data and is now relying solely on internal, global numbers. They're also switching from reporting "active sub households" (which doesn't account for multiple people watching on one screen) to the "views" metric. This change in methodology makes a direct comparison tricky, to say the least.

Adding another layer to the puzzle, Samba TV reported that the Season 2 premiere was watched by 1.7 million U.S. households on premiere day. That’s a 39% drop from the 2.7 million U.S. households that tuned into the Season 1 premiere in the same timeframe. Sure, Paramount is measuring global viewership, so Samba's data doesn't paint the complete picture. But it does suggest that "Landman" might be performing better internationally than domestically. Maybe it’s finally finding its audience in new territories!

The shift towards the "views" metric is interesting. Netflix really pushed it into the mainstream after the release of "Queen Charlotte," and Disney has followed suit. It allows streamers to frame their viewership numbers in a more positive light, but it does obscure some of the real picture. With a cast including Billy Bob Thornton, Demi Moore, and Sam Elliott, "Landman" certainly has star power. Whether it can maintain this initial momentum remains to be seen. For now, it seems the oil drama has certainly ignited *somewhere* in the world, but whether the US audience is fully on board is still a bit of a question mark.