There are different ways to see which TV/streaming series captivated the Fandom community the most in 2023. Firstly, you can just go by straight wiki traffic for the entire year and check out Fandom’s 10 Most Popular TV & Streaming Series Wikis Of 2023, but that doesn’t necessarily capture the full scope of the TV pop-culture year since it contains a few legacy series that aren’t on the air anymore and other shows with years (and even decades) to establish a fanbase and lore that contributes to constant engagement.
A different approach though is to look at which shows caused the biggest spike in traffic following their debut, whether it be the series premiere or a new season. Those are the shows that fanned the flames of fandom and brought the community out to learn more about what they just watched.
These shows can range from brand new series like The Last of Us to long-running programs like South Park. They could have deep fantasy lore involved, like The Witcher, or be on their second (or is it third?) resurrection, like Futurama.
Let’s look back at the year of TV premieres that helped spike Fandom’s wikis a whole bunch as they arrived.
10. South Park Season 26
With Season 26 (!), South Park actually surpassed Arthur and became the second longest-running animated series in the United States behind The Simpsons. You may think that after over 25 years on the air that fans might be ho-hum about the series but 2023’s premiere back in February still led to a nice 34% bump in traffic. The series still runs on Comedy Central, after all this time, with streaming available the day after on Max, as it tackles current events in its specific animated parody manner. And yes, does add to its own wacky lore for people to look up the history of, because it’s been a few decades now!
9. Star Trek: Picard Season 3
Star Trek, as a Fandom wiki, needs no help as Memory Alpha forever remains one of the most-searched TV-based wikis around. But with Star Trek: Picard’s third and final season – a tremendous run that made up for the lackluster first two seasons – fans rejoiced by giving Fandom wikis a nice 54% jump in readership. It certainly helped that Picard Season 3 brought back the entire Next Generation cast – including Jonathan Frakes, Marina Sirtis, Michael Dorn, Brent Spiner, Gates McFadden, and LeVar Burton – for one more glorious and emotional adventure, while ditching most of the elements from the first two seasons.
8. Outlander Season 7
As Starz long ago lost, or at least muddled, its brand identity as a premium cable channel, Outlander’s felt more and more like an outlier. But the love for this show, as well as the Diana Gabaldon book series is based on, is global and as the seventh premiered its first half in June of 2023 – the second half to air in 2024 – Fandom’s wikis saw a 74% spike in traffic.
And don’t worry Outlander fans, the series may be ending, eventually, with its eighth season, but back in January, Starz picked up the prequel series Outlander: Blood of My Blood, about Jamie Fraser’s parents, for 10 episodes.
7. Drag Race Season 15
RuPaul’s Drag Race continued to be one of the trendiest reality competition shows around in 2023, moving from VH1 to MTV in the United States for its broadcast run, while also including the largest cast in the show’s history, with 16 competitors overall – including biological twins, Sugar and Spice. The Season 15 double-episode premiere caused a 78% bump to the Drag Race Wiki.
Airing from January to April, the finish saw the first-ever first trans woman, Sasha Colby, winning it all.
6. Mayans MC Season 5
FX’s Sons of Anarchy was one of the hottest shows on the air during last decade’s Golden Era of Anti-Hero TV but there wasn’t nearly as much attention given, especially during the later seasons, to the SOA spinoff, Mayans MC, which closed up shop in 2023 after five seasons.
That being said, the Season 5 premiere, “I Hear the Train A-Comin,” helped bring a 78% jump in traffic to our wikis. It’s clear the fanbase was still there and invested – or perhaps coming back to see how it all wrapped up, given no other series in the franchise is currently in the works.
5. The Legend of Vox Machina
Season 2
Critical Role and adjoining animated series The Legend of Vox Machina continued to be streaming hits in 2023, with Critical Role as a weekly D&D series – on Twitch and YouTube – featuring notable voice actors playing the game and Vox Machina being the crowd-sourced and funded animated series, airing on Prime Video, based on the first campaign (with the folks from Critical Role voicing their respective characters).
Season 2 premiered back in February, continuing the first campaign and causing a big 118% bump to Fandom’s wikis. Prime Video has picked up Vox Machina for a third season while plans are also underway to animated Critical Role’s second campaign, The Mighty Nein.
4. Futurama Season 8
Futurama is back, baby!
…Again!
This time it wasn’t Comedy Central doing the revival, it’s Hulu, which brought back the series, and the original cast for a new 20-episode season, split into two 10-episode blocks. The Season 8 premiere (or Season 11, for TV broadcast – it’s complicated), back in July, gave Fandom’s wikis a 120% increase in traffic, though this new revival had already made headlines before even entering production when star John DiMaggio, who voices Bender, spent a month trying to negotiate a higher payday for the revival, spawning a social media campaign called #BenderGate.
Thankfully it all worked out, since DiMaggio wasn’t going to return at all at one point and fans had to, briefly, imagine a world where Bender was voiced by someone else.
3. Vikings: Valhalla Season 2
This is somewhat one of those occasional head-scratchers you get when it comes to online fans, as the original Vikings series on History never made a huge stir, per se, and spinoff Vikings: Valhalla, while not a bad show, has made even less of an obvious pop culture impact, as a Netflix series that gets binged over the course of a weekend and then often feels forgotten about – even as it’s possible millions are watching it.
We don’t know how happy Netflix is with Valhalla‘s performance — the show will conclude with Season 3 in 2024, which is a pretty typical run for the streamer these days — but we do know that when Season 2 rolled around back in mid-January, we saw a 125% rise in traffic to the wikis.
2. The Witcher Season 3
The Witcher, as a full franchise, has a noteworthy global reach, starting with its Polish fantasy books, spreading through its acclaimed video games, and now reaching a peak, of sorts, with its Netflix series.
There was even a time when Netflix was setting this up to be its new tentpole, in the anticipation of Stranger Things ending. Interest began to wane, though, when Season 2 didn’t match the numbers of Season 1, though there were still spinoffs coming that couldn’t be thwarted – like the animated film The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf and prequel series The Witcher: Blood Origin.
Then star Henry Cavill decided his time as Geralt of Rivia was over, causing the lead role to be recast and Liam Hemsworth taking the spot. This transition hasn’t happened on screen yet, but Season 3, which was split into two parts, with a month break in between (something Netflix started to do with other big series like Stranger Things), was Cavill’s final ride as Geralt and fans still gave Fandom’s wikis a whopping 255% bump in traffic as it debuted.
1. The Last of Us Season 1
These last few entries caused significant jumps at their wiki of over 100%, and The Witcher even brought that above 200%. But the number one with a bullet winner – by a huge margin – is HBO’s The Last of Us, which blasted off by bringing a 620% leap in wiki readership after its premiere episode in January, “When You’re Lost in the Darkness.”
The Last of Us is one of the biggest TV hits of the year, making a huge pop culture splash in the process. Just when we thought viewers had tired of zombie apocalypses (yes, we know The Last of Us doesn’t have “zombies” per se), this show demonstrated that people will care if things are done right. Just simple, time-honored “found family” surrogate dad-amongst-the-wasteland awesomeness. The series not only brought in fans of the spectacular video game series but also people who’d never heard of the games, just based on the premise, the strong ad campaign, and perhaps the HBO pedigree.
