Community – Picture: Sony Television
All six seasons of Community were made available on Netflix worldwide as of April 1st, 2020, and have seen a huge boom in popularity according to several metrics.
In the US, Netflix now shares the license to Community with Hulu, so while it has been widely available for the past five years via a streaming service, only now has the series received widespread attention.
The sitcom featuring Chevy Chase, Joel McHale, and Donald Glover ran for five seasons on NBC before heading to the now-defunct Yahoo Screen! Since then, it’s been streamed on Hulu in the US.
How can we tell the series has seen a massive rise in popularity? Well, we can use a variety of tools to see popularity. IMDb puts every movie and TV series into a ranking called the MovieMeter. From that, we can see that Community has risen from the 300-400 range to sitting at number 8 in the rankings as of April 18th, 2020.
The Netflix bounce in full flow for Community. Climbed to #8.
Was ~300-400 before it joined. pic.twitter.com/eMVSYi9yhK
— Kasey Moore (@kasey__moore) April 17, 2020
We can also see search trends using Google Trends to measure how well it’s doing. Below, we’ve compared Community’s trend line for the past five years in both the United States and worldwide.
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- Google Trends data for Community worldwide
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- Google Trends data for Community in the United States
Has Community replaced Friends?
In the context of the global streaming wars, show rights will be coming and going as more competitors jump in the market. Friends was one of the most recent high profile removals from Netflix cited as a huge loss. The series was removed from Netflix on January 1st, 2020, and is set to release on HBO Max this May.
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- Community vs Friends Worldwide
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- Community vs Friends in the US
When we compare the above, we can see that Friends searches have certainly dipped so far in 2020 in the US and have now been matched by searches for Community.
Elsewhere, Friends still takes a handsome lead, but it’s worth noting that Netflix only lost the rights to Friends in the United States. In other countries, such as the United Kingdom, the complete series remains available and isn’t scheduled to be removed for a while.
Earlier in the year, the Netflix executive team, when asked about the Friends departure, said that there had been no significant impact saying that audiences tend to move to the next big thing.
What does all this prove? Well, in the short term, not too much. However, what it does present the case for is Netflix’s ability to slingshot a show’s popularity.
Have you been watching Community since it was added to Netflix? Let us know in the comments.
