Jenna Ortega in ‘Wednesday,’ Meghan Markle in ‘Suits’ and Steve Carell in ‘The Office’
Courtesy of Netflix; Everett (2)
Netflix released a huge amount of streaming data on Tuesday — viewing totals for more than 18,000 movies and seasons of TV for the first half of 2023.
Taken as a whole, it’s almost an overwhelming amount of information that speaks to Netflix’s ability to engage its huge subscriber base (just under 239 million for the end of the period covered in the data dump) — and maybe not a ton more? The stats presented are for total hours viewed, which is how Netflix measures engagement across its portfolio — but it’s also not the metric the streamer uses to order its weekly top 10 lists. For those, it uses the “view” formula of total watch time divided by running time, which somewhat levels the playing field for films and series with shorter run times. (And there are, of course, economic factors and other metrics that influence decision-making that the company will continue to keep in house.)
That explains why Wednesday is fourth on the 18,000-title list released Tuesday but first in Netflix’s all-time, English-language series rankings (which also only cover the first 13 weeks of release). Season four of Stranger Things had more viewing time over that span, but since Wednesday‘s total run time was more than six hours shorter, it ranks first in views.
After poring over the giant spreadsheet, here are some things that stand out.
A very diverse top 25: Dr. Ana-Christina Ramondirector of UCLA’s Entertainment & Media Research Initiative — which puts out a Hollywood diversity report each year — noted that six of the top 25 titles on the list (Wednesday, The Queen of the South season three, FUBAR, Manifest season four, The Mother and Fake Profile) have Latinx lead or co-lead actors. Nine other entries in the top 25 — Ginny & Georgia is there twice, for each of its two seasons — also feature people of color in lead or co-lead roles. That means 60 percent of the 25 biggest titles on the streamer from January to June star people from the global majority.
Additionally, six of the top 25 — La Reina Del Sur, Fake Profile and Korean series The Glory, Physical: 100, Crash Course in Romance and Doctor Cha — are in languages other than English (though dubbed versions also exist).
Tough break: The most watched show that ended up being canceled is Sex/Lifewhich had 175.5 million hours of viewing for season two, which premiered in early March, and 126.4 million for season one (available for all six months). Season two drew 45 percent less viewing time over its first four weeks than did season one (albeit with two fewer episodes), but both seasons ranked in the top 70 titles from January to June.
Just behind Sex/Life is the fantasy drama Shadow and Bonewhich Netflix cut in November. It had 292.4 million hours of viewing across its two seasons (including 192.9 million hours for season two. Netflix cut several other shows along with Shadow and Bone as it assessed its priorities following the end of the SAG-AFTRA strike in November.
No thanks: About 21 percent of the 18,214 entries on Netflix’s spreadsheet — 3,813 in all — had between 50,000 and 149,999 hours of viewing (rounded to 100,000), a barely noticeable amount of time when the entire list totals to more than 93 billion hours. As best we can tell, the least watched of those that was a) a Netflix original, b) released worldwide and c) was available for all six months is Making the Witcher: Blood Origin. It’s a 14-minute, behind the scenes doc released the same day (Dec. 25, 2022) as the limited series spinoff of The Witcher starring Michelle Yeoh. Blood Origin itself had 65.3 million hours of viewing from January to June.
The Office is still a thing! At least in other parts of the world. The long-running NBC sitcom hasn’t been on Netflix in the United States since 2020, but its nine seasons amassed a combined 341.1 million hours of viewing worldwide between January and June.
Here again are the top 20 titles from the list, followed by some selected shows further down in the rankings.
At No. 50 is The Recruit (146.9 million hours of viewing), the spy drama starring Noah Centineo as a young CIA officer. It premiered Dec. 16, 2022. While almost 147 million hours of viewing is a big number, The Recruit comes in 30 percent below the 20th ranked title (Luther: The Fallen Sun) and a whopping 82 percent less than The Night Agentwhich sits at a clear No. 1 with 812.1 million hours of viewing.
Coming in 100th is That ’90s Show (95.1 million hours), the streamer’s sequel to That ’70s Show (which, incidentally, streams on Peacock) that featured most of the original cast for at least a few episodes.
At No. 200 is season four of Suits (64.2 million hours), which was the top streaming show in the United States for most of the summer and fallaccording to Nielsen rankings. It premiered stateside on Netflix on June 17 but has been available in other territories for years — which helps account for a discrepancy between the streamer’s weekly top 10 rankings and the six-month list. Season four didn’t crack the global top 10 at any point — only the first season did following its U.S. debut — but the boost from premiering in the States coupled with half a year of viewing elsewhere in the world carried the show to a relatively high spot in the rankings.
Dropping down to line 1,000 on the spreadsheet, it’s season three of the French animated show Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir at 21.4 million hours. Miraculous is tied with the movie Hard Target 2which (who knew?) is a sequel to/reboot of to the 1993 Jean-Claude Van Damme film (though Van Damme was not involved). Titles are listed alphabetically, so Miraculous gets the round number.
Our final stop is at entry No. 7,830where the 2014 British movie ’71 is the first of 302 titles with 1 million hours of viewing. Netflix rounded each one’s watch time to the nearest 100,000, so all 302 of those shows and movies had somewhere between 950,000 and 1,049,999 hours of viewing. That in turn means that starting with entry 8,132 (Sr.a documentary about filmmaker Robert Downey Sr.) every other title in the list had under 950,000 hours of viewing. Those 10,082 titles make up a majority of the entries on the list, but they collectively gathered only 3 percent of the 93.46 billion hours of viewing.
