‘Ted Lasso’ Hits Series-High Ranking On Nielsen Streaming Charts Ahead Of Season 3 Finale; ‘The Mother’ & ‘Queen Charlotte’ Still Dominate

BreAnna Bell It’s a bittersweet goodbye for “Ted Lasso.” During the May 29-June 4 viewing window, the series jumped 62% in viewership from the previous week on the Nielsen Streaming Top 10 chart, pushing it to No. 3 on the list of overall titles with 1.2 billion minutes. According to Nielsen, the Apple TV+ title first appeared on its Streaming Top 10 list rankers midway through Season 2 in 2021. In total, it has made the overall list 11 times, and the originals list 19 times. Throughout the weekly episodic releases of Season 3, which premiered March 15, Ted has made the overall list in 9 of the 12 weeks, and has landed itself on the originals list in all 12 weeks. The finale episode, which was released on May 31, 2023, received 529 million viewing minutes by itself this week, marking the highest weekly total for a single episode of ‘Ted Lasso’ ever. Since the show was released in August of 2020, Ted Lasso has generated almost 25 billion viewing minutes in total.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor Just last May, the world got to experience a real-life coronation when King Charles ascended to the throne. Over on Shondaland’s new Netflix series “Queen Charlotte: A Bridgeton Story,” there was a coronation too that needed to take place, and it was up to production designer David Ingram to create one. When it came to pulling off Queen Charlotte’s (played by India Amarteifio) coronation, Ingram considers it fortunate that the show was shot in the U.K. “We could get the carriage,” Ingram says, stressing it was a replica one. “We could hire it and adapt it. We were able to reupholster it and repaint it.” But the golden carriage was the least of his problems. The challenge was how to approach Westminster Abbey, traditionally used for real coronations, weddings and funerals, about how to shoot the scene.

Editor’s note: Deadline’s It Starts on the Page features standout drama series scripts in 2023 Emmy contention. It showcases the critical role writers’ work plays in a show’s success. Arrangements were made before the WGA strike began on May 2.

Queen Charlotte is all about marriage and romance - but it sounds like the cast themselves have been very lucky in love too! Sam Clemmett, who plays Brimsley in the hit show, recently revealed that he was celebrating that he and his wife Danarose Clemmett were celebrating their one-year engagement anniversary - and fans didn’t even realise that he had tied the knot!Sharing a snap of himself with Danarose, the actor captioned the post: "Been a year since we got engaged. Wow. Beyond lucky to call you my wife.

Michael Schneider Variety Editor at Large Imagine you’ve been given a role in a pilot: The exciting news appears in the trades, you film the episode and take the cast publicity photos. Then your show is picked up! But there’s a caveat: Your role is being re-shot with a new actor. Devastating! Cue sad trombone sound effect. That’s why I like these kinds of stories better: The background actors, guest stars and recurring actors who eventually graduate to series regular status thanks to sheer persistence and talent. That’s the case this season for “Ted Lasso” standout James Lance, who plays Trent Crimm — formerly of The Independent, now just independent — on the show.

Jon Burlingame “Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story” has one of the most complicated, and yet stylistically unified, scores of any series this year — Kris Bowers‘ original score, the 18th-century period music, and a surprising number of string-quartet covers of 21st-century hits. The Netflix series, a prequel to the 2021 hit “Bridgerton,” imagines a Black bride for England’s King George III in 1761, chronicling their initially rocky marriage and her gradual understanding of the monarch’s mental illness; flash-forwards to 1817 feature an older and wiser queen. Bowers, who earned two Emmy nominations for his work, returned for the prequel but took a different approach. “This show needed a level of intimacy that the score for ‘Bridgerton’ doesn’t necessarily have,” he says. “My initial instinct was to write for a smaller ensemble, and to mic and mix the music in a way that was more intimate and tactile, a sense of closeness to the instruments.”

On their latest shows, Brett Goldstein and Theo James have created characters who unpeel deeper truths beyond their hunky appearances. Goldstein, who’s won two Emmys for portraying soccer player and coach Roy Kent on “Ted Lasso,” returned for the Apple TV+ comedy’s third season. (He’s also a co-creator and writer on “Shrinking,” about a therapist played by Jason Segel.) James joined the second season of HBO’s “The White Lotus,” set in Italy and from creator Mike White, as a chiseled, privileged vacationer. THEO JAMES: How did you end up writing for “Ted Lasso”? BRETT GOLDSTEIN: I’d done a pilot for Bill Lawrence. The pilot didn’t get picked up, but we stayed in touch, and he knew I was a writer as well as an actor. When people ask me for advice, I’m always like, there’s no magic phone call. It doesn’t happen. But I did get a magic phone call here, from Bill, out of the blue, saying, “I think you’d be good for this football show.”

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor It took a village to build the costumes for Shonda Rhimes’ latest “Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story.” Costume designer Lyn Elizabeth Paolo and co-costume designer Laura Frecon paired up to tell young Queen Charlotte’s (India Amarteifio) story and her rise to power in Britain, after her marriage to King George III. But even though Rhimes told Paolo it was going to be a “small spin-off,” the costume designer who had worked with her on “Scandal” and “How to Get Away With Murder” knew that Rhimes would want “everything to be glorious.” There were going to be grand scenes, such as a funeral and a coronation. Frecon says, “We were told there were no balls,” referring to the grandiose costume fetes that marked almost every episode of “Bridgerton.”

Whitney Friedlander Whether it’s a collision in an office elevator or a case of mistaken identities, fans of romantic comedies have a love-hate relationship with meet-cutes: The central couple must meet somehow and, since this is a love story, preferably they should do so in a cute way. But how many more white shirts must be killed in the name of clumsy-cute trip-and-falls while holding cups of coffee or orange juice?  For serialized romances, the challenge is even greater. Directors and writers must create interesting run-ins for characters to help sustain interest for longer than it takes for audiences to eat a bucket of popcorn.  “I feel like the bar now is, if you are expected to figure out a meet-cute, it has to be your new slightly subversive never-before-seen version of it,” says director Jay Karas. “I don’t think it’s a trope that we can totally get away from, because people have to meet somehow, and it’s just about how do you modernize it.” 

Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story continued its reign over Nielsen’s streaming charts from May 8 to May 14, but Jennifer Lopez’s The Mother gave it a run for its money.

Selome Hailu Missing for the third week in a row from Nielsen’s weekly streaming rankings is “Citadel,” Amazon Prime Video’s $185 million spy series starring Priyanka Chopra and Richard Madden. The May 8-14 viewing window marked the series’ second full week of availability and its third week with a chance at making the chart, as it premiered on April 28, meaning that viewership during its first three days of availability would have counted towards the April 24-30 charts. During that first window, Nielsen noted that “Citadel” just missed the streaming originals chart (not to be confused with the overall Top 10 chart) bringing in 306 million viewing minutes and losing out on the tenth place position to John Mulaney’s “Baby J.” Nielsen did not provide information regarding the series’ viewership for the May 1-7 or the May 8-14 windows.

It’s official, The Mother is one of Netflix’s most popular films of all time.

BreAnna Bell “Manifest” Season 4 returned to the Netflix Top 10 chart at No. 2 after the release of part two, which arrived on June 2. During the May 29 – June 4, the show was viewed for 39.4 million hours — that’s a slight drop from Season 4, part one’s release which opened on Netflix’s Top 10 at the No. 1 spot after its Nov. 4 release. The series scored 57.1 million hours viewed in its first three days of availability. Meanwhile, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Fubar” continues to reign over the list of English TV titles with 88.03 million hours viewed and appeared in the Top 10 in 91 countries. In just 10 days, the action-comedy had nearly 25 million views. Netflix calculates total views (177 million hours viewed) by dividing the the total hours viewed by runtime hours (7.13 runtime hours).

Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story was crowned No. 1 on Nielsen’s streaming charts for the week of May 1 to May 7.

Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story's Arsema Thomas has opened up about the special bond she shares with co-star Golda Rosheuvel. The Bridgerton prequel, which debuted on Netflix last month, chronicles the origins of the titular character, whose rise to power and marriage to King George sparked both an epic love story and a societal shift in the Ton. The narrative is split between 1761 and 1817, with Rosheuval reprising her role as Queen Charlotte in the later timeline, while Thomas plays the younger version of Adjoa Andoh's character, Lady Agatha Danbury, in the earlier one.

Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story star Freddie Dennis has admitted to "crying quite a lot" while watching a certain HBO show. In a profile piece for WWD, the actor spoke about how the fourth and final season of HBO's Succession had him feeling very emotional as it led up to its finale episode. "It's witty, sharp and heart-wrenching as well," Freddie said of the series.

took its final bow on Wednesday, as the series finale found Jason Sudeikis' titular coach on a plane back home to Kansas, and the rest of its main characters on new journeys of their own.But is this the end of the road for the AFC Richmond Greyhounds? Sudeikis and the show's cast and creators have long insisted that the show was always planned as a three-season run. But that was before they dominated the Emmys' comedy categories two years in a row and became one of the most beloved streaming series.Brett Goldstein, who plays Roy Kent on the Apple TV+ soccer comedy in addition to writing on the show, told the  last summer that, as far as the writers are concerned, the third season would be the show's last.«We are writing it like that.

Stephen Rodrick SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers from the series finale of “Ted Lasso,” now streaming on Apple TV+. Here’s a scoop: There will be a fourth season of “Ted Lasso.” Actually, it has already aired, and it was not great.  “Ted Lasso” grew out a character created by Jason Sudekis and friends for NBC Premier League promos, a Kansas City-based football coach who somehow finds himself coaching the other football in London for AFC Richmond, a chronically downtrodden franchise. It’s a typical fish-out-of water premise, which is a classic comedy trope, but comes with some limitations — namely, when the fish becomes an amphibian and begins to love land life. Mindful of those constraints, “Lasso” debuted in 2020 to acclaim, with critics lauding its cock-eyed optimism as the world struggled with a deadly pandemic. Season 1’s 10 episodes ran an average of 30 minutes apiece, totaling 299 minutes for the season.

ended its acclaimed three-season run on Wednesday with Jason Sudeikis' titular coach returning home to Kansas, though it's safe to say that none of the show's beloved characters ended up in the same place they were when the series began.None more so, perhaps, than Jamie Tartt, played by Phil Dunster, whose emotional evolution over the course of the Emmy-winning comedy has made him a fan favorite. The star striker of AFC Richmond, Jamie was a prototypical diva in season 1, though Ted's kind and gentle coaching style began to break him down.

SPOILER ALERT: The following reveals major plot points from the Season 3 finale of Apple’s Ted Lasso.