“Suits, a series that finished airing on television four years ago, is the hit show of the summer," declared the Washington Post on July 31.
"My sister is watching Suits. My boyfriend’s mom is watching Suits. I am now rewatching Suits," wrote The Guardian's Adrian Horton, calling the off-USA Network legal comedy-drama "America’s most-watched TV show of the summer."
If you believe in Nielsen's deeply flawed methodology for measuring streaming video, that latter description is spot-on for the NBCUniversal series, which after running on USA Network for nine seasons from 2011-2019 and introducing the world to an up-and-coming actress named Meghan Markle in the process, suddenly out of nowhere made its case as a go-to binge rerun after dropping the first eight of its nine seasons on Netflix back on June 17.
Suits, which stars Gabriel Macht as a high-flying attorney who begins bro-ishly mentoring a law-degree-less college dropout with genius-level capabilities (played by Patrick J. Adams), has been available on Peacock for several years. But it was the Netflix drop in mid-June that sent it into the binge-watching stratosphere.
According to Nielsen, Suits has ranked No. 1 among all shows in subscription streaming from June 19 through the July 30, the last day for which the research company has so far published streaming data.
With 20.31 million minutes of U.S. streaming on Peacock and Netflix measured by the research company over the initial six-week span since Suits dropped on Netflix, the show ranks second only to Netflix mega-hit Stranger Things since Nielsen started publishing weekly streaming rankings three years ago.
So Suits is a massive strike-era hit, showing the world how the TV business used to run back when writers were more appropriately paid and given a proper mount of creative control. (This Los Angeles Times article penned in early August by former Suits scribe Ethan Drogin is can't-miss reading if you find any part of that notion compelling.)
That is one, agreeably legit way of looking at it. Another is to say that the resurgence of Suits represents a nice little regional story amid a streaming business that has gone truly global, with what is its biggest supplier, Netflix, now operating in more than 190 countries.
Since it signed off on the USA Network in September 2019, references to Suits only occasionally surfaced amid reporting on the background of Markle, whose marriage to Prince Harry rendered her the Duchess of Sussex in 2018.
The series became a U.S. streaming hit when Netflix got ahold of the first eight seasons. It is thus logical to conclude that the bulk of Suits streaming this summer has occurred on Netflix, which has 75.6 million subscribers in the U.S. and Canada vs. 24 million for Peacock.
Yet, Netflix's own self-published programming metrics, which cover usage in more than 100 countries, paint a much different, far more nuanced picture of Suits' streaming success.
Since it debuted on Netflix, Suits has placed in the top 10 in the platform's weekly English-language TV series rankings only for four weeks, finishing at its highest position, No. 5, for the week of June 19-25, during which season 1 drew 27.7 million hours of streaming.
That same week, according to Netflix's own data, season 6 of original sci-fi series Black Mirror ranked as the No. 1 English-language show not only on the broader Netflix platform of over 100 countries, but also more specifically among U.S. Netflix users.
The fact that Suits ran on both Netflix and Peacock clouds the comparison of Netflix's rankings vs. Nielsen.
Also read: Nielsen and Netflix Bump Heads Again on Programming Metrics
For that same week of June 19-25, Nielsen, which doesn't measure viewing on mobile devices, reported that combined U.S. viewing of all nine seasons of Suits on both Netflix and Peacock beat all seasons of Black Mirror by a total of more than 800 million streaming minutes.
Did the added margin of Suits viewing on Peacock make that much of a difference? On most weeks, 800 million U.S. streaming minutes alone will rank a show at least in the bottom half of Nielsen's top 10. We couldn't find a single week before June 17 in which Suits on Peacock alone cracked Nielsen's ranker.
Again, we have often found Nielsen's streaming metrics fishy when directly comparing them to Netflix's first-party data. On one occasion, in early 2021, Nielsen even revised its rankings for Don't Look Up after Next TV accused the research company of shortchanging the original Netflix film.
But as far as Netflix's own data goes, the streaming company has delivered no numerical proof that Suits has been a runaway global hit on its own platform.
Netflix ranks each season of shows individually, which further complicates comparisons to other measurement systems. But according to Netflix's data, the first season of Suits hasn't garnered as much engagement as it did that first full week on Netflix (June 19-25). And no subsequent season of the show available on Netflix, from seasons 2-8, has managed to crack Netflix's weekly top 10 this summer.
Netflix does publish select and limited insight as to how shows and movies rank in individual countries. It's unclear as to whether any season of Suits, or the combined volumes of Suits, ever finished No. 1 on Netflix in the U.S. on any given week this summer, by Netflix's own accounting.
