The beloved drama series ‘Gilmore Girls’ has bid farewell to Netflix, marking the end of a 12-year-long era. As of July 1, the show is now streaming exclusively on Amazon Prime Video, leaving behind a legacy of enduring popularity and nostalgic appeal. The series, which originally aired from 2000 to 2006 on The WB and The CW, has become a reliable seasonal fall favorite for U.S. audiences, consistently ranking in the Nielsen streaming charts from September to January each year.
Last year, 18 years after the series finale, ‘Gilmore Girls’ entered the Nielsen streaming charts with a whopping 534 million views across Hulu and Netflix. What’s most interesting is that the show has attracted not only nostalgic audiences who grew up watching during its original run but also a new generation of fans over the last decade-plus as a streaming offering.
According to Nielsen, two-thirds of the viewership from September 8 to September 14 was from women, and 35% of the audience was from adults aged 18-34. The Netflix departure may seem less significant now, given the streamer’s decision to share ‘Gilmore Girls’ with Hulu since 2024. However, for the decade prior, the show was already speaking to a whole new generation of fans with its resurgence on Netflix alone.
During the fall season prior to the Hulu deal, ‘Gilmore Girls’ was the 8th most-watched show on Netflix, with 640 million views. At the time, Nielsen noted that 56% of its audience was in the 18-34 age demographic. It’s difficult to quantify the early reception to ‘Gilmore Girls’ when it originally arrived on Netflix in 2014, as there is limited reliable audience data from that period. However, Netflix’s enthusiasm for the series was clear early on, with the company announcing the revival ‘Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life’ just over a year after the original episodes started streaming.
The series of four 90-minute telepics premiered in 2016 and performed quite well, with preliminary numbers from research firm Symphony Advanced Media placing it third in the 18-49 demo behind ‘Fuller House’ and ‘Orange is the New Black’ during its first three days. By the time Netflix rolled out its own annual data dump, the revival was already seven years old. Yet, from 2023 to 2025, ‘A Year in the Life’ has generated 18.2 million views on its own. Adding in all seven seasons of the original, ‘Gilmore Girls’ content has scored Netflix nearly 264 million views over that two-year period.
While fans of the series will still be able to access all the episodes on Prime Video, this move could be a win for the Amazon streaming service, which has been leaning heavily into YA programming lately. With continued buzz around the steamy adaptation of Elle Kennedy’s ‘Off Campus’ series among others, this could be the perfect time for Prime Video to add some more of those series’ long-running and enduring predecessors to the streaming library.
The true test will be whether ‘Gilmore Girls’ reclaims its annual spot on the Nielsen streaming rankings come Labor Day. With its departure from Netflix, the show’s future on Prime Video remains uncertain, but one thing is clear: ‘Gilmore Girls’ has left an indelible mark on the world of television, and its legacy will continue to captivate audiences for years to come.
