'Ozark' Season 3 Brings Record Viewers, As Americans Stay Home And Binge Netflix

We already knew Netflix's original series Ozark, set at Lake of the Ozarks, was a hit, but Season 3 has blown previous seasons out of the water, according to numbers released by Nielsen and Netflix.

Netflix’s Ozark was one of the streaming service’s best-performing original series on its Season 3 premiere day—March 27—and drew an average minute audience of 8.7 million viewers for its first 10 days. The crime drama almost tripled its Season 2 premiere day audience and doubled last season’s 10-day total.

The data released Wednesday comes courtesy of Nielsen’s Subscription Video On Demand Content Ratings solution, and is the latest example of the impact the nation’s stay-at-home orders have had on streaming numbers.

On Tuesday, Netflix said in reporting its Q1 2020 earnings that Emmy Best Drama Series nominee Ozark, which stars Jason Bateman, Laura Linney and Julia Garner, is projected to be seen by 29 million members in the first four weeks after its March 27 premiere.

Nielsen said the first day of Ozark‘s Season 3 scored an average audience of 975,000 unique viewers on Day 1, spiking past 1 million on both Day 2 and Day 3 (a Saturday and Sunday). Overall, 16.4 million watched across the series’ first 10 days, compared with Season 2’s just under 11 million unique viewers.

Netflix’s figures are based on the number of households (accounts) that chose to watch a given title, while Nielsen’s metrics measure only U.S. TV screens (no international numbers are included, and data doesn’t include mobile screens).

Regardless of the metric, Ozark‘s ratings numbers are impressive, with its Nielsen figure topping the likes of its own Season 2 premiere day (314,000), the final-season premiere day of Orange Is the New Black (536,000) and even Tiger King (280,000), which of course gained its own unique momentum in this quarantine time; Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness drew 34.3 million unique viewers in the first 10 days of its release, from March 20-29, according to Nielsen data earlier this month.

As for four-week totals, Ozark‘s Season 3 compares with Season 3 of fellow original series The Crown (21 million). Netflix’s original series The Witcher by comparison drew 76 million in its first month.