EXCLUSIVE: Tell Me Lies has made a splashy return to Hulu. The Season 3 premiere generated 5M views globally across Disney+ and Hulu in the first seven days of streaming, Deadline can exclusively reveal based on internal data from Disney.
That’s up 150% from the Season 1 premiere’s performance in the same time frame, Disney says. This is the first time that Disney has released specific viewership stats for the series, which has become quite popular with young viewers as evidenced by its social engagement. The company didn’t say how Season 3’s premiere performance stacks up against Season 2.
Season 2 didn’t make it onto the Nielsen streaming charts in its debut month, but it also premiered against the first season of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, which likely proved to be some tough internal competition. The Nielsen charts for Season 3’s premiere week won’t be available for another month.
Disney did say that, in the week after the first three episodes of Season 3 launched on January 13, social conversation was 220% higher than the same period after the Season 2 debut. Total engagement on Tell Me Lies handles grew 580%.
While this is the first peek at viewership for Tell Me Lies, Disney has previously touted the seven-day viewership of a few other streaming series that provide some contextualization. For example, last year the season finale of Hulu’s Paradise scored 6.3M views in seven days, which was a series high. King of the Hill got the most-viewed adult animation season premiere across Disney+ and Hulu in five years with 4.4M views in seven days. The target audiences and expectations for these series are likely quite different, so direct comparisons wouldn’t be fair, but there is at least a barometer for how episodes of some of the more popular scripted series on Hulu have performed in their first week.
Tell Me Lies is based on Carola Lovering’s novel of the same name. The eight-episode third season will follow Lucy Albright (Grace Van Patten) and Stephen DeMarco (Jackson White) as they’ve re-entered their up and down romantic relationship just in time for the spring semester at Baird College.
Returning cast also includes Sonia Mena, Spencer House, Alicia Crowder and Tom Ellis. As Deadline first reported, Iris Apatow has joined the cast for Season 3 in the recurring role of Amanda, a bubbly but fragile college freshman keeping a big secret. We also broke the news of Costa D’Angelo’s casting as Alex, a psychology grad student and part-time drug dealer who has a complicated past with Bree.
Season 3 debuted on January 13 with three episodes, new episodes stream weekly on Tuesdays.