It might not get as many magazine covers as its younger rivals, but Americans love their NCIS — they really, really love it. And despite the cliché that it’s only grandparents watching the show on their linear TV sets, it’s not just a small-screen hit: The show is a smash success on streaming, too. According to the ratings gurus at Nielsen, the long-running CBS drama just marked its 200th appearance on the weekly overall streaming top-ten list, making it the first show of any kind to hit that milestone. It did so by racking up some crazy viewership stats:
➼ During its 200 weeks on the chart (it should be 201 when the newest ranker comes out later today), Nielsen says NCIS tallied 136.5 billion minutes of viewing time, or a mind-numbing 259,643 years spent watching those sexy military investigators track down bad guys.
➼ Looking just at 2024 data, NCIS was the fifth most-streamed title of the year (both new and library shows), with just shy of 36 billion minutes watched.
➼ While the show does, indeed, have a strong fan base of older viewers, a very healthy 42 percent of NCIS’s 2024 streaming audience was comprised of adults under 50, with 53 percent of the viewership eligible for AARP membership, while 5 percent were under 18.
➼ If you include viewership of the more than 1,000 episodes of all the various NCIS spinoff shows, past and present, and also include broadcast, cable, and syndication viewership, CBS Studios and Nielsen say the entire franchise is responsible for a ridiculous 4.58 trillion minutes of viewing time over the past 20 years. (Take that, Dick Wolf.)
To be sure, the NCIS mothership has several things going for it that have helped it snag 200 appearances on Nielsen’s chart. The ratings giant releases streaming data based on overall consumption rather than average viewership per episode (the standard for linear broadcasts). So because there are so many episodes in the NCIS library, and they’re all about 40-something minutes in length, folks who want to watch can watch it a lot before they have to start rewatching the same episodes. (The same is true for shows like Friends, Grey’s Anatomy, or most of Mr. Wolf’s Law & Order shows.)
What’s more, while some companies have confined their most audience-friendly classic hits to a single platform they own — think The Office on Peacock or Friends on Max — Paramount Global and CBS Studios license the original NCIS to both Netflix and Hulu (they each stream 11 seasons) as well as their own Paramount+ (which has all 22 seasons, including the current one). Given how much bigger Netflix (and even Hulu) are versus, say, Peacock, that makes a big difference in ensuring people who want to watch these shows actually can. It also means Paramount Global is making a lot of money on NCIS, both for itself and the show’s creative partners, rather than using it as a loss leader to help build a subscriber base for Paramount+. And wisely, Paramount has been using some of the money it makes from selling NCIS to other streamers to invest in making new versions of the franchise that it can then offer as P+ exclusives, such as the upcoming NCIS: Tony & Ziva. So while nothing about NCIS screams “hip” or “trendy,” I’m guessing execs at Paramount and CBS Studios are more than happy about the two other words that do spring to mind when talking about the franchise: cash cow.
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