DEAD BOY DETECTIVES. (L to R) Jayden Revri as Charles Rowland and George Rexstrew as Edwin Payne in episode 4 of DEAD BOY DETECTIVES. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2023
The Dead Boy Detectives may be dead on arrival. Welcome to your first-week rundown of how well Netflix’s new Sandman series is doing or not doing, as the case may be.
How well did the show debut in its first four days?
It ranked second in the English TV charts, with 22.2 million hours watched and 3.1 million views. For those unfamiliar, views are completed viewing equivalents, which means Netflix takes the number of hours watched and divides that by the show’s runtime. These do not represent the number of people who have watched a show, as some outlets would have you believe.
In Netflix’s press release for the week, which was primarily focused on the English TV side of Baby Reindeer, Dead Boy Detectives got a quick mention:
“Dead Boy Detectives, the new supernatural detective series described by co-showrunner Steve Yockey as “The Hardy Boys on acid,” debuted in second place with 3.1M views.”
Of course, these numbers don’t exist in a vacuum, so let’s compare them to other English-language shows that are also released on Thursday. Note that all those in green are renewed series, all those in yellow are currently awaiting renewal, and any in red are canceled.
From this graph, you can see the show is ranking very low so far, fitting in between another canceled YA series, The Imperfects, and Glamorous.
As noted in our season 2 post for Dead Boy Detectives, the show is most like Lockwood & Co and Half-Bad, two young adult fantasy series canceled in 2023. In these two cases, they were both released on Friday, meaning it’s not a perfect comparison, but what we can see is that Dead Boy Detectives sits just barely above Half-Bad. If we add The Sandman into the mix, we can see that DBD is trailing significantly behind… Not good.
According to multiple sources, we have heard that season 2 was in early development, and the showrunners even implied as much. Still, it is unclear whether the series was greenlit in advance, and if it isn’t and relies on viewership for a renewal decision, it does not look good.
Of course, everything could change in week two, and the show grows massively in viewership. FlixPatrol does suggest that the show is holding strong in the daily top 10s so far this week, suggesting we could see a big gain in week 2, but will it be enough?
Frederic will have more on Dead Boy Detectives, Baby Reindeer, and Rebel Moon Part Two: The Scargiver in his regularly scheduled top 10 report out tomorrow.
Are you optimistic about the future of Dead Boy Detectives on Netflix? Let us know in the comments down below.