I spent a little time with what is apparently the latest phenomenon to hit streaming media during yet another sleepless night via Prime Video’s OFF LIMITS. At least that’s how THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER’s Rick Porter framed it when he obliged the platform’s spinmeisters with this Tuesday drop:
Off Campus has skated its way to a strong debut for Prime Video. The Amazon-owned streamer says Off Campus, based on Elle Kennedy’s romance novel series, has reached 36 million viewers worldwide over its first 12 days of release (including the Memorial Day weekend in the U.S.)…The 36 million figure puts Off Campus among the three biggest series debuts in Prime Video’s history over 12 days, according to Amazon. It’s behind only The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and Fallout…Young women in particular have tuned in to Off Campus: According to Prime Video, it has had the highest performance among women 18-34 of any series on the service.
Well , that would seem to explain why I was so late to this party, since I am clearly neither a woman nor anything close to 18-34. It may also explain why I chose not to see it to its completion. But that’s apparently a moot point to Prime, as DEADLINE’s intrepid Nellie Andreeva scoffingly pointed out:
Amazon has not revealed how it counts viewers; it’s also unclear whether these are average viewers for the season and how the comparison was made since Off Campus and Fallout‘s eight-episode first seasons were released as drops while The Rings of Power‘s eight-episode opening season was a weekly release after a two-episode premiere.
And as even Amazon’s own Amazon Ads site cautions its clients, the threshold for what qualifies in their book is fairly minimal:
(W)hat does “viewed” really mean? The standard definition indicates that at least 50% of the ad must be in view for at least one second for display ads and two seconds for video ads. This is the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) and Media Rating Council’s (MRC) viewability standards definition, but the guidelines may depend on other factors and individual marketers or media.
They’re not alone in how a desperate industry tries to make numbers seem all the more significant in an era where old school ratings and shares have become statistically irrelevant. Prime is using a metric called “reach” and as veterans like Porter and Andreeva fortunately noted that doesn’t necessarily mean traction or or a fan base has been established to the extent that a competit0r that is clearly on its mind seemed to achieve, as Andreeva was quick to note:
The series has been able to capitalize on both Prime Video’s strong YA momentum created by mega hit The Summer I Turned Pretty and other popular titles such as the Culpables movie franchise and series We Were Liars and Maxton Hall as well as the massive success of the Crave/HBO Max hockey romantic drama Heated Rivalry.
But as the still camera-shy Entertainment Strategy Guy devoted a disproportionate amount on his now Ankler-free Substack recap of 2025 winners and losers yesterday–nearly five full months into 2026!–at least from his data-rich lens putting the label “massive success” on HEATED RIVALRY is, if nothing else, more aspirational than accurate:
Heated Rivalry, a TV show that got more news coverage last year than possibly any other TV show, likely surpassing Stranger Things for buzz. I’m talking think pieces and write-ups in virtually every center/center-left magazine, website and podcast.
Did you notice that I didn’t mention this show once in the article in my recap of the top new shows in 2025? Honestly, I forgot about it until I was mostly finished with my write-up. I briefly mentioned Heated Rivalry in my recap of the flops, bombs and misses of the second half of 2025 in a parenthetical about how I wasn’t including it, but that was it. I stand by that now. This show is still a huge question mark. I wrote extensively about Heated Rivalry months ago, over 3,000 words detailing all the positives (buzz, datecdotes and ROI) and negatives (not making the viewership charts and some exclusive Nielsen data on the show’s low weekly viewership). Based on the pushback I received at the time, I’m not really in a rush to write about it again or rehash those arguments.²
But what’s a few minor details in giving a freshly installed top dog the chance to take a victory lap in the press, hoping against hope there will be more than enough buzzy and less experienced journos who will give more air to statements like the one that accompanied every mention of OFF LIMITS anywhere:
“Obsession is officially in session at Prime Video, thanks to the fans who have embraced Off Campus,” said Peter Friedlander, head of global TV at Amazon MGM Studios. “We couldn’t be happier to see such a passionate community come together around season one of creator Louisa Levy and co-showrunner Gina Fattore’s interpretation of Elle Kennedy’s beloved story. When you earn trust and deliver for an audience, they show up — and they’ve certainly done so for Off Campus.”
When your job is to craft narrative for An Audience Of One, you sometimes have to put your objectivity and instincts aside. We truly have no clue how many minutes each of those 36 million cumulative viewers watched–with each having the opportunity to watch up to 415 minutes of program time over said 12 days. We have no clue if they binge-watched or rewatched certain scenes with bare-chested hunks getting it on as was apparently what drove so many of HEATED RIVALRY’s most passionate fans–especially in that W 18-34 demo–into a frenzy. For a demo where fluidity and fantasy is all the more acceptable, who cares what the gender of the recipient is? As long as Friedlander was able to humble brag and show his new employers that he’s off to what some might consider a good start, the goal was achieved.
We saw another shining example of this sort of servitude played out with the astoundingly skewed coverage attached to a single holiday weekend Friday night of late night television that a ridiculous number of crying-in-their-beers publications actually chose to care about, such as THE DAILY BEAST’s
Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show finale put CBS atop the late-night ratings charts. His replacement’s premiere plummeted them to the bottom. When Colbert, 62, left CBS on Thursday, so too did all of his viewers. The first episode of Byron Allen’s Comics Unleashed to premiere at Colbert’s previous 11:35 pm time slot drew just 995,000 viewers, according to initial Nielsen data reported by LateNighter. By comparison, Colbert’s series finale attracted more than 6.7 million viewers via the same metric, meaning CBS saw an 85 percent downturn in viewership just one day after Colbert’s show went dark for good. Comics Unleashed also failed to match any of its late-night peers, with Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon each earning more than 1.5 million viewers on the same night. And while Fallon aired a new episode, Kimmel’s was a rerun.
This particular nugget was shared more than a hundred times by folks on my social media feeds alone–depending upon their political leanings, it was seen either as vindication or, worse yet, proof positive that indeed the death of late night television had just occurred before our very eyes. At the risk of alienating everyone, I cannot begin to tell you how few f-cks anyone with a shred of experience in this world or any real skin in the game care.
Colbert’s departure was a seminal event driven by nearly a year of hype. The reason why Fallon atypically aired a first-run episode on a Friday was because he chose in solidarity to not air an original episode he was contractually obligated to produce on the night his friend exited the late night wars for good. The reason why Allen chose such an otherwise inconsequential night to commence his time buy was out of respect to the 34th anniversary of Johnny Carson’s departure–which was roughly the last time anyone ever cared about what any network program did on a Friday in late night. This was as much an apples-to-oranges comparison as anything could have possibly dredged up. And yet, pretty much everyone EXCEPT Stephen Colbert and the networks involved chose to make it a headline.
And that includes Allen’s own research team, who crafted this throwback ad similar to the kind I and my peers were ordered at gunpoint to produce for otherwise forgettable syndicated shows. We used to use much more creative ways to obfuscate stories such as practically unreadable qualifiers and asterisks that would more seamlessly co-mingle mixed demos and ratings services in an attempt to give a CEO and a desperate sales executive a smoking gun to shove in a client’s face. In this case, this effort wasn’t even successful enough to pull the wool over the eyes of someone as inexperienced as Mason-Hill:
According to Allen Media Group, the billionaire media mogul’s TV company, Allen’s comedy panel show beat Kimmel, 58, and Fallon, 51, in specific local markets, though the Nielsen data used in its graphic is cherry-picked by targeted demographics.
The gentleman responsible for this began his career crafting similar hyperbole for the likes of XENA and JERRY SPRINGER, so this is not unfamiliar territory. And being number one in a metered market where a CBS station may simply be stronger than its competitor–several major market NBC and ABC stations were literally created as digital answers to affiliation shifts over the years, particularly in demographic cells where the statistical threshold of a full rating point is less than one metered household–is indicative of absolutely nothing other than one point in time.
But again–Audience Of One. Allen apparently wanted something to hang on a wall or humble brag about, just like Friedlander. Not to mention something that at least on paper was an attempt to hush the nay-sayers hell-bent on actually being naive or deranged enough to somehow think a comparison as ludicrous as juxtaposing the Pro Bowl against the Super Bowl was back in days when the actual game was played a week after the big one. I suspect he thought this was impressive and meaningful, and I know his research head got to keep his job for another day. I’m willing to cut him a mulligan, since I know I’ve done worse for less.
But that doesn’t mean you need to care about any of these attempts to manipulate narratives. Judging by how little attention was paid on a daily basis to performances in prime time or in what remains of syndication on a typical day–even in what some now outdatedly still refer to as sweeps, usually you didn’t. Why bother starting now? Go watch some real hockey, FFS.
Until next time…