“I love you, but you’re not serious people,” the Rupert Murdoch-like media mogul Logan Roy told his perpetually scheming children at one point in The Rehearsal, the second episode of Succession’s buzzier-than-ever fourth and final season that aired over the weekend. But while Kendall, Connor, Shiv, and Roman might not be serious, the Succession fandom certainly is — which is also why it surprised me to see HBO’s hit series pretty far down the list on one of the latest top streaming charts. Correspondingly, Showtime’s Yellowjackets is at the very top of that list.
With the amount of online chatter that it gets — not to mention the volume of recaps and podcast discussion that surrounds the show — you’d be forgiven for assuming Succession is the most popular TV title in the US right now. Or one of them, at least. And it certainly is one of them. It’s just maybe not as popular as you might think, based on the latest JustWatch Top 10 streaming chart for the US.
The most popular streaming TV shows in the US
JustWatch’s latest chart of the hottest streaming shows, covering the period between March 27 and April 2 (per iMore), ranks the following ten shows from the major streaming platforms according to their JustWatch popularity scores. In descending order, they include:
- Yellowjackets
- The Night Agent
- Rabbit Hole
- Ted Lasso
- The Mandalorian
- Succession
- Lucky Hank
- Yellowstone
- Shrinking
- The Last of Us
If the show that’s currently sitting at the top of that list doesn’t ring a bell with you, and if you’re surprised to see Apple’s Ted Lasso and even Netflix’s current mega-hit The Night Agent failing to secure the top spot, then keeping reading for a preview of what you need to know about Showtime’s Yellowjackets — a critically acclaimed series with a dedicated, cult following.
What to know about Yellowjackets
Here, first, are some indications to help understand just how much of a hidden gem this Showtime psychological drama is.
For one thing, the network announced a Season 3 renewal months in advance of its Season 2 debut in recent days. Also, both Season 1 and Season 2 of Yellowjackets each enjoyed perfect 100% scores from critics on Rotten Tomatoes as recently as mid-March (and both have either perfect or near-perfect Rotten Tomatoes scores currently).
In addition to the early Season 3 renewal, the green light for a second season came halfway through the first batch of episodes (which garnered a Critic’s Choice nod for best drama series). Gary Levine and Jana Winograde, Showtime’s entertainment presidents, have described themselves as “overwhelmed by both the acclaim and the audience response” to the show, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The show’s plot: Yellowjackets tells the story of a high school women’s soccer team that unfolds across two timelines. One timeline is focused on the aftermath of a 1990s-era plane crash that stranded the girls in the wilderness, where they were left to fend for themselves. In the other timeline, 25 years later, the now-adult women are still living with the weight of what they did as teenagers in order to survive.
“Permanently altered something within me,” reads one of the 5-star Rotten Tomatoes reviews from a Yellowjackets viewer.
