One way you can get a sense of just how big a TV show is comes after it wraps up. Biff the conclusion of a show with a large enough fanbase, and you’ll basically never hear the end of it — as Netflix is getting a taste of right now, following the release of the fourth and final season of The Umbrella Academy that’s more or less sent hardcore fans of the series into a tailspin. “Please spare a thought for your local Umbrella Academy fans this weekend,” one viewer wrote on X/Twitter the day the final season dropped earlier this month.
“They’ve just suffered a Game of Thrones level catastrophe. Arguably worse.”
Indeed, the reaction from fans has been swift and brutal. And so many of them are pissed because they cared. They got deeply invested. Making things all the more painful is the fact that they waited two years after Season 3 to get a resolution to the story, only for the writers of this beloved Netflix gem to cram the final season with (no spoilers) rushed plotlines, story turns that didn’t do justice to the world they’d built, and characters making choices that felt completely unbelievable to fans.
According to the streaming search engine Reelgood, The Umbrella Academy is the #1 show across all of streaming this week, but rest assured it’s not because of viewer satisfaction with the complete, finished product. It’s #1 for now because so many fans were primed and ready to dive back into it, but that ship has now sailed. “so sad the umbrella academy was cancelled after season 3,” another fan lamented on X/Twitter.
Accordingly, the final season of the show is currently sitting at a mere 18% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 53% critics’ score. Yikes. But as I said: For now, Reelgood — which monitors 20 million viewing decisions each month across every streaming platform in the US, from Apple TV+ to Max, Disney+, Hulu, Netflix, Prime Video, Paramount+ and more — has found that The Umbrella Academy beat out everything else in the streaming universe this week.
For the 7-day period that ended on Aug. 14, the 10 TV shows that topped Reelgood’s latest weekly ranking are as follows:
- The Umbrella Academy (Netflix)
- A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder (Netflix)
- Presumed Innocent (Apple TV+)
- House of the Dragon (HBO/Max)
- Industry (HBO/Max)
- Bad Monkey (Apple TV+)
- Time Bandits (Apple TV+)
- The Bear (FX/Hulu)
- Evil (Paramount+)
- Batman: Caped Crusader (Prime Video)
As for the rest of the biggest streaming TV shows of the week, one that I want to call particular attention to is Apple TV+’s newly debuted Bad Monkey. From creator Bill Lawrence, the same TV genius behind Apple standouts like Ted Lasso and Shrinking (as well as Scrubs for NBC), Bad Monkey stars Vince Vaughn in the kind of series that I just feel like the world doesn’t have enough of — tight, funny, comfortable shows that don’t aim too high but which also don’t set their bar too low, either.
In Lawrence’s third show for Apple TV+, which is also Apple’s most-watched show as of this writing, Vaughn stars as a wisecracking, motormouthed literal Florida Man. He plays a character named Andrew Yancy who works as a health inspector in the Florida Keys after being bounced from the Miami Police Department. “But after stumbling upon a case that begins with a human arm fished up by tourists,” Apple explains about Bad Monkey, which is based on the 2013 novel by Carl Hiaasen, “he realizes that if he can prove murder, he’ll be back in.
“He just needs to get past a trove of Floridian oddballs and one bad monkey.”
It’s fun, different, screwball, a little edgy — in other words, somewhat new territory for the streaming home of “I believe in believe.” In fact, Bad Monkey starts off with a tourist fisherman discovering a severed arm floating the in the water, the middle finger of which is still hilariously extended thanks to some bizarro rigor mortis. It’s that kind of show.
