Each year, ratings monitoring service Nielsen gives out its ARTEY awards, which identify the most streamed series in the US. Individual streaming services are at best selective and at worst opaque when releasing viewing figures, so the Nielsen data, while imperfect, is as good as it gets for cross-service comparisons.
The 2025 winners have just been announced. Naturally, Australian media largely focused on the fact that local children’s favourite Bluey was the most streamed show overall. No surprise there: (a) it’s excellent (b) kids love repeat viewing (c) parents love the brief respite from whining brats that repeat viewing offers.
But what jumped out at me was an odder winner: the “most-binged” series was ancient Western drama Gunsmoke, which hasn’t been on screens as a regular show since 1975 but can be streamed (in the US) on Paramount+, Peacock and Pluto. How does that do so well?
The Nielsen media announcement isn’t super-helpful, merely noting that Gunsmoke‘s figures averaged 241 episodes per viewer. Not many shows have 241 episodes available to start with: Gunsmoke is the longest-running Western and the eight-longest-running scripted US series of any kind (measured by years in production). So length of your original run clearly helps, but that would also apply to Grey’s Anatomy and NCIS.
The full list of winners offers some more context:
This year, [Gunsmoke] solidified itself as a streaming staple, more than doubling its total minutes from 10.2 billion in 2024 to 22.5 billion in 2025. This year it’s been crowned the most-binged streaming title of the year, averaging a whopping 241 episodes per viewer out of the 404 total episodes available to stream.
To put those numbers in perspective, 22.5 billion minutes is under half the number Bluey pulled for the year. But it’s still an extraordinary figure.
It’s also a highly rubbery one, because counting Gunsmoke episodes is tricky. Nielsen mentions 404 available episodes. Wikipedia’s listing of Gunsmoke episodes says there are 635 in total, which break down as follows:
| Length | Format | Number |
|---|---|---|
| 30 minutes | B&W | 233 |
| 60 minutes | B&W | 176 |
| 60 minutes | Colour | 226 |
Even assuming the early 30-minute episodes aren’t being repeated, the figure of 404 doesn’t quite make sense. The total number of 1-hour episodes is 402. One possibility is that there are some episodes excluded from the 1-hour era (I bet there’s some sexist and racist stuff in there), while some of the TV reunion movies made between 1987 and 1994 are included. It’s also possible Nielsen’s episode count simply isn’t accurate; I can imagine an episode being counted twice because of different punctation, for instance.
Nielsen says that “accessibility” is a key reason for Gunsmoke‘s growth, noting that “its availability on ad-supported platforms like Pluto enabled fans of the show to stream for free. Unsurprisingly for a show that premiered in 1955, Gunsmoke‘s audience tends to skew older. It is also a favorite among Black viewers, who contributed 29% of watch-time across the year.”
We can make some additional unkind assumptions at this point:
- We know Gunsmoke‘s audience skews elderly, so its viewers have way more time to catch up on the show.
- We know Gunsmoke‘s audience skews elderly, so its viewers may fall asleep in front of episodes without fully watching them, but still get counted.
- We can guess Gunsmoke‘s audience skews Republican, so hacking the viewing data may be beneficial in some odd way to purveyors of misinformation.
But we can’t confirm any of those guesses directly. What we can say is that there’s evidently still an audience for (relatively) ancient TV fare.
Completist point: none of this will help if you’re a Gunsmoke fan in Australia. Paramount+ doesn’t offer it, and nor does anyone else. You might just have to buy the DVDs (which aren’t hard to come by second-hand).
For more TV deep dives, check out how Friends rates on Netflix, whether Kwicky Koala is really Australian, how Aussies got to see the Star Wars Holiday Special more than any other country, literally everything we know about a long-lost Muppet special and whether Summer Bay has a railway station
Image: Wikimedia Commons
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