NEW YORK — Netflix’s Wonka’s The Golden Ticket runs on Gene Wilder’s AI-cloned voice, and American viewers have just made it the most-watched program on streaming.
Nielsen counted 1,078 million minutes of viewing on U.S. television sets for the show in the week of Sept. 28 to Oct. 4, up 26 percent on its opening week, when it finished fifth, according to Nielsen’s weekly chart and The Hollywood Reporter’s comparison with the week before.
The number flatters the show, and Netflix’s own figures show how. Its global Top 10 for the same week ranks the series fourth among English-language TV with 4.3 million views, down from 4.6 million and second place a week earlier. Hours viewed rose from 28.3 million to 34.1 million, but the season’s runtime grew from about 6.1 hours to 7.85 when a two-part finale arrived on Sept. 30. Minutes, in other words, rose faster than the audience did.
The show’s central device is no secret. The Hollywood Reporter reported in June that Netflix and producer Eureka Productions had permission from Wilder’s estate and worked with the AI company ElevenLabs. His widow, Karen B. Wilder, said the estate was “delighted that Wonka’s The Golden Ticket celebrates the warmth and imagination that he brought to the role.” Approval from an estate is not approval from an audience, and none of the charts measure the second.
The two charts also disagree about the season’s winner. Nielsen’s chart puts East of Eden, Netflix’s seven-episode Steinbeck adaptation that premiered Oct. 1, third overall at 782 million minutes, behind The Big Bang Theory’s 953 million on HBO Max. Netflix’s published data put East of Eden first in English-language TV, with 6.5 million views in the four days after launch.
The yardsticks differ. Nielsen measures U.S. viewing on TV sets only; Netflix counts the world. By TEH’s arithmetic, 1,078 million minutes is about 18 million hours, more than half of the 34.1 million hours Netflix reports globally. Either the show skews heavily American or the two methods are not measuring the same thing, and neither company explains the gap.
What neither count reveals is how many viewers ever reached the finale.
