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Netflix's The Roast of Tom Brady, part of the star-studded Netflix is a Joke festival and hosted by the dynamic Kevin Hart, premiered on May 5, 2024, to rave reviews, drawing 2.5 million viewers on its debut and nearly 14 million in the first week. This comedy extravaganza outperformed most other specials on the platform. However, the three-hour runtime proved a challenge, with only 59% of viewers watching to the end. In contrast, the shorter Jonas Brothers Family Roast boasted a 77% completion rate. Despite this, Netflix continues to dominate the comedy scene, delivering top-tier stand-up and roast content.
This week we tackle the newly-released celebrity roast special, The Roast of Tom Brady and how Netflix continues to invest in stand-up shows and roasts to keep the status of the premier platform for comedy.
Netflix has been working hard to cater to various tastes of their audiences and one of their methods was reviving the art of stand-up comedy and roasts. Over the years, the streaming giant has revolutionized the landscape by expanding their library of stand-up and roast specials featuring both well-known comedians and emerging talents and allowing them to reach a wider audience. Thanks to this commitment, comedy enthusiasts around the world could watch acclaimed comedy performances such as Chris Rock’s Selective Outrage, Matt Rife’s Natural Selection or Dave Chappelle’s The Dreamer.
May viewing data reveals that Netflix is maintaining its commitment to comedy specials. On May 5, 2024, The Roast of Tom Brady, a roast special aired live on Netflix as part of the Netflix is a Joke comedy festival and started captivating audiences around the world. The show was hosted by Kevin Hart and featured a bunch of celebrities and comedians.
By looking at the May rankings, we can definitely say that the show trended on Netflix almost immediately. On May 5, it was watched by over 2.5 million Unique Viewers and was the number one title watched on Netflix in the United States.The Roast of Tom Brady performs exceptionally well not only compared to other titles released in May but also to all stand-up and roast specials available on Netflix in 2023. On the chart below you can see that to be in the 90th percentile (i.e. to perform better than 90% of stand up/comedy shows), comedy specials in 2023 had to attract at least 400,000 viewers on the release day and 3.5 million viewers in the first 7 days, whereas Tom Brady’s show gained 2.5 million and almost 14 million Unique Viewers respectively, so it clearly outperformed its competitors.
To look further into its success, we compared Tom Brady’s roast performance with the most popular stand-up (and roast) comedies on Netflix. As we can see below, as of June 2024, in terms of the number of Unique Viewers gained in the first 3 days since the release, Tom Brady’s show was losing only to Chris Rock: Selective Outrage but then it took the lead.
Although the new roast special attracted millions of viewers in the first days of the release, did it engage the audience enough to make them finish watching the whole three-hour performance?
As our Completion Rate metric reveals - not really. Only 59% of viewers that started watching the show, finished watching it within the first 7 days since the release. So if we look at the ranking by Unique Viewers in the first 7 days, it’s nr. 2 among other Netflix comedy specials but in terms of Completion Rate, it’s not even in Top 200. Just for comparison, over 77% of viewers finished watching Jonas Brothers Family Roast in the first 7 days, but it lasted only 1h 8 min. So whether it’s about the duration or poor jokes, the show intrigued massive audiences around the world but not enough to keep them watching until the end.