‘Stranger Things’ is a real hit: 16 million Americans watched its Season Two premiere, according to Nielsen

Netflix’s “Stranger Things” is back for a second season, and the show — which features Dungeons & Dragons-playing kids from a small town in Indiana battling real-life monsters unleashed by a government research lab — looks like a bona fide hit.

In the U.S. alone, some 15.8 million people streamed the first episode of the new season within three days of its launch Oct. 27, according to Nielsen. Within the first day of its availability, 361,000 people had binge-watched all nine episodes.

How does that stack up against other popular shows? We don’t have perfect apples-to-apples comparisons, but for example:

• The first four games of this year’s Major League Baseball World Series averaged 15.4 million viewers watching live or same-day on DVR, according to Nielsen.
• HBO’s “Game of Thrones” Season 7 premiere this past summer reached 16.1 million people on its first night.
• “The Defenders,” a Netflix original based on Marvel superhero characters, was watched by 6.1 million viewers in the week after its first episode in August.
• 4.6 million people streamed Season 5 of Netflix political satire “House of Cards” this spring.

Nielsen, which has long distributed network and cable TV ratings, recently gave the world a window into Netflix viewership by revealing ratings for the first time. Netflix disputes the accuracy of Nielsen’s numbers but has not provided its own.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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