Did ‘Good Girls’ Season 2 Get a Bump From Netflix?

Good Girls Season 2 premiered on NBC last night to the show’s worst ratings ever. The dramedy’s first season averaged a 1.0 in the important 18-49 demographic, and last night it only earned a 0.7. This is interesting because it proves that the Netflix bump might help a show’s visibility, but it does nothing for live TV ratings.

Good Girls was an under-the-radar gem that premiered on NBC last February. The show stars Christina Hendricks, Retta, and Mae Whitman as suburban women pushed by circumstance to pursue crime. The show received a newfound bump in popularity when it hit Netflix in January. Google Trends for the past 13 months show that Good Girls’ popularity in search trends spiked to an all-time high when the show first became available on the streaming service, and that interest is still higher now than during the first season’s run.

However, it doesn’t seem like that newfound popularity extends to tune ins. Without the help of The Voice as a lead-in, Good Girls stumbled in its premiere. But NBC might not have been expecting a live ratings bump. As Nina Metz of The Chicago Tribune notes, “NBC will be just as happy if the show is watched in the ‘urgent viewing window’ — within seven days after an episode airs — on Hulu (NBC owns a 30 percent stake). For cable subscribers, the broadcaster also makes its shows available for free on nbc.com as well as the NBC app (neither of which are ad-free).”

Metz also explains that Good Girls, like The Good Place, hit Netflix thanks the streaming service’s relationship with Universal. While The Good Place also found a jump in popularity thanks to its availability on Netflix, its live TV ratings also didn’t improve. Its digital viewer numbers, however, did go up. More people are watching in that coveted “urgent viewing window,” but on Hulu and NBC.com.

So what’s the real value of adding a network show to Netflix? The presumption has been that adding a high-quality, but struggling show to the service helps boost that show’s ratings. Riverdale‘s Season 2 premiere more than doubled after its first season became a Netflix binge-watch darling. However, Riverdale‘s numbers then dropped off significantly. In fact, almost half of the show’s audience on average comes from DVR. And yet, it’s still considered one of the most popular shows in the zeitgeist.

It seems that a Netflix bump doesn’t help kill a ratings slump, but it does make a show “buzzy.” Moreover, people who find a show on streaming are more likely to seek it out on streaming than they are to tune in live. So who really wins when a network show hits Netflix? It looks like the big winner of a Netflix bump may actually be…Hulu.

Where to stream Good Girls