The Mandalorian Season 3 Premiere Numbers From Samba TV Are Lower Than Season 2s, But Don’t Panic Yet

The Mandalorian season 3 debuted its first episode on Disney Plus a couple of weeks ago, and though we can't really have a sense of how it's performing overall with viewers, as the streamer doesn't disclose those numbers, we are getting some pieces of the puzzle.



The most reliable unit of measure of how well a series performed in North America comes when Nielsen releases its ratings for a given week; something that typically doesn't happen until a month or so later. In the meantime, there are some bits of information we can gather to start painting the picture of how the first episode did overall. Following last week's report from Parrot Analytics, which said that the series experienced high online demand, surpassing other shows like Stranger Things or Ted Lasso, Samba TV has just reported their numbers.



For the unaware, Samba TV is a company that tracks the viewership data from 25 million households across North America. From that, they sample 3 million TV devices and record what they are watching. However, there is a large cloud of uncertainty surrounding these numbers, as there usually is with Samba TV overall. According to the company's social media, The Mandalorian was viewed by 1.6 million households on the first five days of release. That represents a 6% drop from the 1.7 million households tracked by Samba TV that watched The Book of Boba Fett over the same period of time back in late 2021/early 2022. 2.08 million households tracked by the company watched The Mandalorian season 2 premiere (23% drop), while 2.14 million tuned in to see Ewan McGregor back as Obi-Wan Kenobi (roughly 25% drop).







There seems to be some confusion here, because The Wrap, who first reported these numbers, set the difference between The Book of Boba Fett and The Mandalorian season 3's numbers at 2% in favor of the former, while the numbers we've seen line up with a 6% drop. The trade also set the difference between The Mandalorian season 3 and Obi-Wan Kenobi at 28%, while we computed a 25% drop. It's possible that the numbers we are using are from the five-day premiere, while The Wrap may be using numbers from the first seven days.



Trying to make sense of these numbers is worthy of a Master's degree, and that's precisely why we shouldn't put too much weight into them, and hold our breath until Nielsen delivers a more solid analysis. For instance, Disney Plus reported in June of 2022 that Obi-Wan Kenobi was their highest premiere ever, though failed to give specific numbers. According to Samba TV, however, Loki had a stronger debut than Deborah Chow's series by a 15% margin.







Bottom line here is that Samba TV is only semi-reliable when we compute the ratio between the viewership of two different shows, as it's comparing over a small sample of the overall number of TV households in the US. It's false to say that 1.6 million households watched The Mandalorian season 3 premiere; instead, we should say that out of the 3 million households tracked by the company, 1.6 million tuned into the first episode.



It is therefore more useful to compare numbers between The Mandalorian season premieres, or other Disney Plus shows. But even then, as we saw with the Obi-Wan Kenobi / Loki example above, that isn't necessarily reflective of how the series performed. So don't panic yet. (There are also logical explanations as to why more people would have been inclined to see The Mandalorian season 2 and The Book of Boba Fett when they came out, as both of their first episodes dropped on Disney Plus at the height of respective COVID-19 spikes in the US.)



New episodes of The Mandalorian are coming out every Wednesday. You can check out Matt's review of Chapter 19 here, and you can also check out the latest episode of SWNN Live, which featured a brief discussion of last week's Chapter 18.



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