It’s a fact of the TV-everywhere era: At any given moment, people are gushing over a show you’ve never seen or even heard of. In the case of “Our Flag Means Death,” a comedy about a soft English gentleman who reinvents himself as a pirate captain, it seemed like nobody would be talking at all.
“I wouldn’t say [the reaction] was bad, because ‘bad’ would suggest people were watching it,” said the series creator, David Jenkins, of the show’s 2022 launch.
Typically, high-profile streaming shows debut with a lot of fanfare but rapidly drop off the radar. For two big shows that rolled out around the same time as “Our Flag Means Death,” “Moon Knight” on Disney+ and “Peacemaker” on Max, consumer demand peaked several days after the shows’ respective finales. That’s according to Parrot Analytics, a research firm that measures demand based on factors such as the volume of internet searches for a title and downloads from blackmarket file-sharing sites.
By comparison, interest in “Our Flag Means Death” sustained as new viewers discovered the show and existing ones rewatched it. Demand didn’t peak until 25 days after the season 1 finale landed—a rarity in the streaming world, according to Parrot, which also estimated that 65% of the season 1 audience was female and 50% from Generation Z.
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