Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. may not seem to hold as prominent a place in pop culture as the relatively dark and gritty Marvel/Netflix shows, but according to a Parrot Analytics study, the series that always seems to be on the verge of cancellation is technically more popular than Daredevil and its platform peers.
In coming to this conclusion, the report didn’t just look at the Nielsen ratings to gauge popularity, but based its findings on “everything from global file-sharing and peer-to-peer traffic to social media activity.” And while it may surprise some fans to hear it, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. actually fared better than every Netflix superhero show, including its most in-demand release, Daredevil.
As it stands, the Clark Gregg-led series is reportedly in the “top 0.3 percent of in-demand TV shows worldwide,” and to put this boast into context, Agents yielded higher numbers in this study than even the likes of Supergirl, Arrow, and Fear the Walking Dead.
Not bad for a show whose fans are constantly made nervous by reports of impending termination. Indeed, while Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. may not yield the most impressive numbers for real-time viewing, the figures for international and delayed viewing have proven to be a lot more encouraging, suggesting that maybe these latest findings shouldn’t be too great of a shock.
What the study doesn’t go into is why exactly viewers have responded well to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. compared to its competitors, and perhaps that’s a debate for another time, but from the sound of things, there’ll be a lot of fans eager to see where the MCU spinoff takes things in its sixth season, which is set to air in July 2019. In the meantime, though we’ve lately been seeing a purge of projects over on Netflix, it looks like Daredevil and Jessica Jones are still hanging in there for now.