If a TV show runs in the city and nobody sees it...

When I came across this article from New York Magazine (technically the Cut, but you know what I mean) on on Fleishman Is in Trouble, I had originally intended to do a post making fun of the many passages like this.

Since leaving New York, Beth has found herself in tears at least once a week. She makes $300,000 a year — more than she’s ever earned in her life — but she’s running out of minutes in the day to squeeze out more dollars. “How do I make the $700,000 that I’m going to need to send her to private school or do the renovation in the attic so I can turn it into the master suite so I can have a tub and so I can have one thing I enjoy in my life?” she says. Her takeaway from the show: “Both avenues are shit. You can stay in New York and climb, climb, climb and never get where you need to go and give yourself a nervous breakdown, or you can move to the suburbs and be like, Who the fuck are these pod people? Neither seems great. Is the secret to it all that we have to just choose a lane and embrace it?” 

The national press, particularly publications with "New York" somewhere in their name), never tire of telling us about the financial and emotional hardships faced by the bottom half of the top one percent. By the standards of the genre, the NYM piece lacks the hilarious budgeting assumptions explaining how a middle class couple can find it hard to scrape by on $300,000 or the stunning cluelessness of a Bret Stephens who thinks a couple in SF making $400,000 are lucky to manage a Camry, still it's hard to beat lines like "so I can have one thing I enjoy in my life." 

But as I started to read up on Fleishman, I started thinking this story might fit better with another long running thread.

The series has gotten a ton of coverage...

... which means (and I apologize for disillusioning some of our less worldly readers) Disney is spending a ton on PR. The streaming industry runs on hype and easy to promote awards bait play a big role.

Opinion | Establishment media’s elitism is driving middle America away. Here’s why my next two columns will focus on a Hulu show about a rich couple living in Brooklyn.

— New York Times Pitchbot (@DougJBalloon) February 10, 2023

Whenever you're reading about these shows, the first question you should ask is "how many people are actually watching. (The second question is "who owns the IP?"). It's often difficult to find out -- streaming services are secretive about these numbers -- but FlixPatrol is probably as good as we'll get. Here's their list of Hulu shows ranked by viewership for 2022.

For a sense of what is popular, here are the top 20. (check out number 5)

1.         Family Guy    
2.         P-Valley    
3.         The Kardashians
4.         Power Book IV: Force    
5.         General Hospital    
6.         Law & Order: Special Victims Unit     
7.         Bob's Burgers     
8.         Power Book III: Raising Kanan     
9.         House of the Dragon
10.       The Chi     
11.       Euphoria
12.       Power Book II: Ghost    
13.       9-1-1    
14.       Love Island     
15.       Only Murders in the Building
16.       Grey's Anatomy     
17.       Abbott Elementary     
18.       The Patient
19.       The Good Doctor    
20.       This Is Us     

 If you go down the list (or use control-F), you find FIiT at 97 out of 119.

Though we can't say exactly how many viewers it takes to get to position 97, we can be pretty sure it's a very small number by TV standards. You almost have to wonder... If you took all the people who wrote articles about Fleishman Is in Trouble, and all the people quoted in those pieces, is it possible you'd have a majority of people who actually watched the show?