“Bluey” is America’s most streamed show for the second year in a row
Bingeable content continues to win out over “unmissable” new shows.
A much-adored Australian animation about a blue heeler puppy has outranked all other streaming shows in the US by minutes watched for a second straight year, per new Nielsen estimates.
In 2025, “Bluey” accrued a rather mind-blowing 45.2 billion total minutes of viewing time — still somehow slightly less than the 55.6 billion minutes it notched the year prior, but considerably more than the next most watched series, enduring medical drama “Grey’s Anatomy” (40.9 billion minutes).
The cartoon, famously a hit with adults and children alike, also outranked the only original series to break the overall top 10: “Stranger Things,” which amassed almost 40 billion viewing minutes in total last year, despite its hotly anticipated fifth and final season only airing at the back end of last year (as anyone who attended a rewatch party might attest).
The 154 episodes (and counting) of “Bluey” mean that each installment clocked a whopping 294 million viewing minutes on average — a much larger tally than averages seen for 500-episode behemoths like “Law & Order.” Netflix’s sci-fi phenomenon “Stranger Things,” meanwhile, puts both to shame, with its tight 41 episodes averaging ~1 billion minutes viewed each. (Yes, we know there are 42 episodes, with that finale landing on small and big screens on New Year’s Eve, but the Nielsen estimates cut off on December 28).
Screening process
Per Nielsen, total US streaming consumption hit 16.7 trillion minutes in 2025 — the highest annual total on record, up 19% from 2024 — and, somewhat dishearteningly for any aspiring writers looking to get a new show off the ground, 9 of the top 10 most watched series are long-running shows with large back catalogs.
Indeed, limited series rarely break into the rankings, with even the buzziest new shows like “Heated Rivalry” simply not having the episode count to put a dent in the minutes of “The Big Bang Theory” that viewers can devour.
So, beyond intergenerational appeal, it’s perhaps no coincidence that bite-size, 10-minute “Bluey” episodes are so popular, as active watching takes a backseat to background noise (see: this classic X post).
