Is cycling seeing the Drive to Survive effect?

Season 2 of Unchained, the Netflix behind the scenes documentary at the Tour de France, has just dropped, so can another edition of Le Grand Boucle be far away? I’ve resisted the temptation to binge watch so far, but even with a few episodes to watch it’s a material improvement on last year. For a start, the producers get over Season 1’s almost pornographic obsession with crashes (although they could still tone it down even more), and of course the inclusion of Pog, gives the whole thing a lot more credibility. 

Unchained, is of course produced by Box to Box Films, almost universally credited with the midas touch after Drive to Survive single handedly made Formula 1 a global success again. Owners Liberty Media might point out it wasn’t just the Netflix series that brought new fans into the sport, but either way governing bodies and rights owners have been falling over backwards to work with the Anglo American production company since the success of their F1 show. 

So are there signs that cycling has benefited from the Drive to Survive phenomena? Netflix has now released some viewing data for 2023 (it gave us “hours watched” for the 18,000 titles that were watched for over 50,000 hours in the first half of the year, and added in Runtime and Total Views for the second half. Prior to that it only released weekly top ten lists and some other select data. The data for the second half of 2023 was only released a couple of weeks ago). 

At first glance it would seem Unchained has performed poorly compared to the other docs that Box to Box has created for Netflix, coming in quite a distant fourth to tennis, golf and F1 in terms of hours watched. It should be noted that the competition had an extra 4-5 months of viewing as Unchained was released in the weeks prior to last year’s Tour (which is probably also not a great time to get viewers for a documentary, particularly given a large swathe of potential viewes are spending more of their free time on their bikes during the summer months). 

So overall, mixed results. If you want a rider analogy, it's very much Thibaut Pinot the 2023 Tour edition, but not the highs of 2014 and definitely not the lows of 2020 ;-)

I’ll dig a bit more into the commercial arrangements around Unchained in future posts (but like most things in cycling the teams aren’t too happy with their cut of the pie).