Star Trek: Discovery has finally broken into Nilesen's Top 10 Streaming shows for its fifth and final season. The show hasn't been a huge favorite by Star Trek fans over the last few years but like with Star Trek: Picard, it appears as though its final season has generated some interest. Yet, viewers don't appear to be sticking around.
In the first update of its season, Nielsen posted the stats for its first three episodes, which came in at 257 million minutes watched. That was good enough for 10th place at the time, but as soon as the figures came in for week four, things would be different. While the show was now 9th out of the Top 10, the series saw a drastic decline down to 241 million minutes watched.
As the Nielsen figures track all, at the time, 59 episodes, it's hard to track just how many people are actually watching the show, and if the drop off has to do with a drop off of interest from the first few episodes to the fourth, or if the audience is moving through the series as expected, thus the figures being lower due to there being just one episode on the docket for that given week.
Another theory is that the first two episodes didn't qualify for the Top 10 ratings, and thus the third episode may have caused an unexpected spike in interest, for whatever reason. The decline in viewing among the other Top 10 shows, may highlight that less competition was being generated for Discovery to deal with.
The figures are a few weeks old, as Discovery is heading into its ninth and penultimate episode of its run. So we won't truly know just how many people stick around until the series finale for some time.