In the fight over who produces the best streaming shows, Netflix and Amazon are the two heavyweights.
Both have poured significant resources into making original shows over the last two years, and have been rewarded with good showings at the Golden Globes.
This year, Netflix led all TV networks in Globes nominations, and last year Amazon's hit, "Transparent," took home two. We should note that Hulu also scored its first Golden Globe nomination this year (for its comedy "Casual").
But since neither Netflix nor Amazon releases viewership numbers, it can be hard to tell how good their shows are on average. We know the top shows for each, but what about the rest of the catalog? We recently used data from reviews aggregator Metacritic to rank Netflix and Amazon's drama and comedy shows from best to worst — leaving out kids shows and documentaries.
But we still wanted to understand how Netflix and Amazon compared to each other, so we looked a bit closer at the data.
Our first takeaway was that there is no absolute winner, though Netflix seems to have an edge.
The whole catalog
The average critic rating for the entire show catalog gave Netflix a 69/100 on average, and Amazon a 70/100. Netflix fared better in the average audience rating, getting a 7.9/10 to Amazon's 7.2/10.
The upper tier
When we narrowed the focus to the top, Netflix's audience lead widened and it overtook Amazon with critics as well. Looking at just the top five shows from each network, Netflix got an average critic rating of 81/100 to Amazon's 76/100. The audience scores were 8.8/10 and 7.5/10 respectively.
Just the hits
Finally, we looked at just the hits, the top three three shows from each company. Netflix maintained its critics lead (84/100 versus Amazon's 80/100), and its audience lead (8.9/10 versus 7.7/10).
The rundown
While Amazon led in overall critics score, it was only by a narrow margin, and Netflix took all other categories. Netflix especially fared well with audiences. One reason for this is because Amazon's critical darlings, "Transparent" and "The Man in the High Castle," both had much lower audience ratings than critic scores.
It's important to also note that Amazon has produced half as many shows as Netflix, 8 to 16 (in the drama and comedy categories), and that both are new to the market. Netflix and Amazon both produced their first original series in 2013.
If you are curious how Netflix and Amazon's 24 shows compared on a show-by-show basis, below is a comprehensive ranking from worst to best, based on critical reception data from Metacritic:
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24. "Hand of God" (Amazon) — 44/100
Average critic score (19 critics): 44/100
Audience score: 6.8/10
Amazon description: "A psychological drama about a morally-corrupt judge who suffers a breakdown and believes God is compelling him onto a path of vigilante justice."
23. "Hemlock Grove" (Netflix) — 45/100
Average critic score (17 critics): 45/100
Audience score: 7.5/10
Netflix description: A quaint town links a mangled corpse to a dark outsider with a carnivorous secret. But monsters come in many forms.
22. "Between" (Netflix) — 47/100
Average critic score (10 critics): 47/100
Audience score: 4.7/10
Netflix description: After a mysterious disease kills every resident over 22 years old, survivors of a town must fend for themselves when the government quarantines them.
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