The Office has officially had its long-standing record of being the most streamed show in the world broken by a much-loved drama.
With the general use of cable television steadily dwindling throughout the United States, streaming services and their statistics have become a hot topic in recent years.
Plus, with watch time becoming one of the most important aspects of modern media consumption, the longer a show can keep people engaged, the more successful it is.
Once upon a time, it was The Office that reigned supreme when it came to hours watched among US streaming services.
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Back in 2020 - in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic - the insanely popular show was ranked number one for overall watch time in a year.
According to Nielsen, it was watched for a total of 57.1 billion minutes by US fans, the most in the history of streaming up to that point.
While it seemed as though that record would remain unbeaten for some time, considering just how popular The Office was and still is, an unlikely usurper dethroned the NBC sitcom in 2023.
Suits, a drama that originally aired on USA Network from 2011 to 2019, became a juggernaut when it finally arrived on US Netflix in June 2023.
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Within just those six months, the show was watched for 57.7 billion minutes by Netflix viewers, shattering The Office’s record.
There are various factors that play into this, but the most pivotal - unsurprisingly - is how much content is available to watch from the respective shows.
Despite The Office having a higher episode count at 201 in contrast to Suits’ 134, each episode of Suits had a runtime of 42 minutes, practically doubling the length of a typical episode of The Office, resulting in the classic sitcom having ten fewer hours of content available to watch than its recent usurper.
When looking at the nature of a show like Suits, it makes sense why it stood above the rest in watch hours in 2023.
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Seeing as Netflix remains one of top streaming service in the US, its general dominance over the watch time leaderboard also aided Suits in taking the top spot away from The Office, which was removed from Netflix at the end of its record-breaking year in 2020.
With a long standard runtime, a relatively high episode count, and an increased audience via its Netflix debut, Suits’ groundbreaking success isn’t at all hard to believe and could be a clue that the long-running drama series has an incredibly large place in the future of streaming.
Topics: Netflix, Film and TV, The Office