Toward the end of 2022, reality dating shows on streaming were all the rage, with scripted romantic dramas taking a backseat. But thanks to a huge uptick in romance-novel adaptations, that positioning has switched — and by quite a wide margin.
A new study by Ampere Analysis found that, thus far this year, scripted dramas have made up 83 percent of first-run romance TV commissions. Since early 2025, 40 percent of those series orders have been literary adaptations, and over the past three years, first-run romance-novel adaptations have jumped 73 percent.
It is Netflix and Amazon’s Prime Video leading the way. As a matter of fact, thus far this year, the two are singlehandedly (double-handedly?) carrying the torch, each accounting for 50 percent of these series orders. Here is something else to love: The jobs are staying stateside with 75 percent of the commissioned productions based in the U.S.
Romance is a reliable genre as young love is always in the air. Since COVID, 18-24 year olds have maintained the same levels of appeal year in and year out; nearly half (49 percent — let’s call them “girls”) of its surveys respondents consumed romantic TV series in the first quarter of 2026. That’s 7 percentage points better than the global average across all ages, a gap only otherwise seen in horror and anime. (Since 2020, comedy and action/adventure fell by 9 percentage points among the youngs; crime/thriller dropped by 5 percentage points.)
