Young Sheldon has just hit a Netflix milestone that was never managed by the streaming hit Suits. When Suits premiered on Netflix in mid-2023 (in addition to already streaming on Peacock), the USA Network legal drama smashed records for an acquired show. It stayed at No. 1 on the Nielsen streaming ratings chart for 12 consecutive weeks, eventually being streamed for billions upon billions of minutes.
Netflix has now calculated their Top 10 English-language television seasons for the week of November 27 through December 3. Young Sheldon season 1 landed at No. 7 with 19.3 million hours viewed, followed by season 2 of the hit CBS sitcom at No. 9 with 12.1 million hours. While neither season of the Big Bang Theory prequel has racked up more minutes than Suits season 1 when it landed on the chart, Suits never managed to have two seasons chart simultaneously during its entire hit run on Netflix.
How Young Sheldon’s Success is Different from Suits
It remains to be seen how Young Sheldon fares on the Nielsen chart, which includes programs from other streamers and takes a longer time to tabulate. However, this Netflix accomplishment is nevertheless considerable. Despite the overall streaming success of Suits, season 1 was the only one of the show’s eight seasons available on the platform to ever chart in the Netflix Top 10, and in fact only appeared on said chart for four non-consecutive weeks.
Why Suits Season 9 Isn’t On Netflix (& Where To Stream It Online)
Season 9 of the highly-acclaimed legal drama Suits is strangely not available on Netflix most likely due to exclusive rights on other major platforms.
However, this milestone doesn’t necessarily mean that Young Sheldon will outperform Suits overall. It is currently unclear how many viewers are making it through the entire show and binging the seasons that aren’t charting. There are also fewer minutes of Young Sheldon available to watch. While the show’s total of 105 episodes on Netflix is comparable to Suits‘ 124, the former is a half-hour show while the latter is an hour-long drama, meaning there are many more minutes of Suits available to stream.
There are also different factors driving the success of both shows. The newly-charting show is still on the air and looms large in the public consciousness, with the buzzy upcoming Young Sheldon season 7 set to end its run on CBS. Even if the sitcom does beat Suits‘ record for an acquired show on Netflix, the fact that the latter show managed to chart four years after originally going off the air is still an impressive achievement.
