The SAG Awards Were a Top 10 Netflix Show — in Canada

Tony Maglio
·3 min read

The SAG Awards are huge — in Canada.

Netflix live-streamed the Screen Actors Guild’s event on Saturday, and though the awards show did not make the Top 10 in the U.S. (or globally), it did in exactly one country: Canada. As a matter of fact, it made the Top 9 (at number nine) there.

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We don’t know exactly how the SAG Awards fared in the U.S. — not yet. Currently, all we know is that it had fewer than 2.1 million views in the U.S. (That is what number 10 English-language show “The Tourist: Season 1” had here during the week of February 19, 2024).

There will be a point at which time we will know exactly how the 2024 SAG Awards performed. Netflix is now performing a giant data dump twice per year sharing the hours viewed for any and every title that was streamed for at least 50,000 hours over six months. That will be easy for the SAG Awards, but don’t hold your breath until then — the January-June 2024 data dump will have to wait a while.

The failure to chart is no slight: the SAG Awards had a steep mountain to climb to make the leaderboard. For starters, the SAG Awards were never all that big to begin with. The 2022 show on the Turner “T-Nets” cable networks (TNT, TBS, and truTV — now all owned by Warner Bros. Discovery) averaged 1.8 million total viewers. The 2023 SAG Awards live-streamed on Netflix’s YouTube channel, but were not on Netflix itself. While not an apples-to-apples comparison, the show generated somewhere between 1.1 million and 1.5 million views.

It didn’t help Saturday’s show that this was the SAG Awards’ first year on the Netflix app itself; making matters worse, the show was on a Saturday as opposed to a Sunday, which is when most awards shows (including prior SAG Awards) take place. And in case you haven’t heard, there is a lot of competition for eyeballs on Netflix.

It also didn’t help that, as IndieWire’s Proma Khosla put it, the 2024 SAG Awards were a “bloated, baffling presentation.” Those aren’t great adjectives for success. Finally, as a live show, the SAG awards is basically putting up a few hours of content vs. an entire week of potential viewership from a regular series — it is in no way a fair fight.

Find the SAG winners here. Saturday was a big night for “Oppenheimer” — but then again, what 2024 awards show was not?

BURBANK, CALIFORNIA - FEBRUARY 07: A view of the casting and molding process during the pouring of the actor statuette for the 30th annual Screen Actors Guild awards at American Fine Arts Foundry on February 07, 2024 in Burbank, California. (Photo by Monica Schipper/Getty Images)
A view of the casting and molding process during the pouring of the actor statuette for the 30th annual Screen Actors Guild awards at American Fine Arts Foundry on February 07, 2024 in Burbank, California. Monica Schipper/Getty Images

See what actually populated Netflix’s Top 10 TV Shows (English, globally) last week here:

English TV Top 10 – Week of Week of Feb. 19:

  1. “Avatar The Last Airbender: Season 1”

  2. “One Day: Limited Series”

  3. “Love Is Blind: Season 6”

  4. “Can I Tell You A Secret?: Limited Series”

  5. “Griselda: Limited Series”

  6. “Warrior: Season 1”

  7. “Mike Epps: Ready to Sell Out”

  8. “Formula 1: Drive to Survive: Season 6”

  9. “Resident Alien: Season 1”

  10. “The Tourist: Season 1”

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