‘Stranger Things’ Dominated All of TV in 2025-26, But the Full Top 10 Tells a Bigger Story About Streaming’s New Era

Television has spent years debating whether streaming and broadcast can truly be measured side by side, and now a definitive answer has arrived. Nielsen’s annual look at the 2025-2026 TV season, compiled using 35-day multiplatform viewership, finally offers an apples-to-apples comparison of how shows are performing across streaming, broadcast, and cable. The numbers paint a vivid picture of where audiences actually are, and the results reveal a landscape increasingly defined by a handful of breakout titles pulling enormous crowds on their own terms.

Netflix and CBS dominated the conversation most aggressively, with each platform stacking multiple entries across the overall top rankings. For the second consecutive season, the biggest show on television came from Netflix, while CBS, despite a down year overall in primetime, placed the most shows near the top of the ratings of any broadcast network. That combination tells a story about the dual forces reshaping viewing habits right now, with the streaming giant and the legacy network finding very different, but equally effective, paths to massive audiences.

According to the rankings shared by Variety, the most-watched series of the entire 2025-2026 season was ‘Stranger Things‘, and the margin it achieved was genuinely staggering. ‘Stranger Things’ final season averaged 32.9 million viewers across 35 days of multiplatform measurement, a total that came in 7.3 million viewers clear of the second-place title, ‘His and Hers’, which pulled 25.6 million. That gap between first and second place speaks to just how singular the cultural moment around the show’s farewell truly was. The season shattered previous Nielsen streaming records by over a billion minutes, and at its Thanksgiving debut week alone, it generated 8.46 billion viewing minutes, setting what Netflix described as a new historic benchmark for streaming viewership.

The third-place entry offered a compelling storyline of its own. CBS’s ‘Marshals’, the first broadcast entry in Taylor Sheridan’s ‘Yellowstone’ universe, starred Luke Grimes reprising his role as Kayce Dutton and drew the most-watched new series premiere of the 2025-2026 broadcast season. The series earned a swift Season 2 renewal just 12 days after its premiere, with CBS noting it had become the most-streamed episode of any CBS program ever on Paramount+. Landing in fourth place, ‘Sean Combs: The Reckoning’, the four-part Netflix documentary about Sean “Diddy” Combs directed by Alexandria Stapleton and executive produced by Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, premiered on December 2, 2025, and its placement at 20.6 million viewers makes it one of the most-watched documentary titles in the entire rankings period.

Rounding out the top ten were ‘Landman’ at fifth, ‘Bridgerton’ at sixth, ‘Tracker’ at seventh, ‘High Potential’ at eighth, ‘The Pitt’ at ninth, and ‘Monster: The Ed Gein Story’ in tenth place. The spread across networks and platforms is striking. CBS placed ‘Tracker’ in the top ten alongside ‘Marshals’, while Netflix accounted for multiple entries including both prestige drama and true crime documentary content. Of the overall top 25 series, CBS shows took eight of the spots, with Netflix accounting for seven, all of which landed within the top fifteen.

What the full list ultimately reflects is a television ecosystem where the old boundaries between streaming and linear no longer hold. Premium returning series, buzzy newcomers, and documentary events are all competing on the same playing field now, measured by the same ruler. The era of guessing whether a streaming hit is “really” performing has quietly come to an end. Which title on this list surprises you most, and do you think any of these shows deserved a higher spot in the rankings?