Netflix has historically been frustratingly cagey about how many people are actually watching its various shows and movies, choosing instead to insist that things are popular without backing it up with any real numbers—or numbers based on ridiculous metrics that don’t really tell you anything, like “minutes viewed,” which is not how the average person would measure the popularity of… anything. Maybe a painting? But that’s all irrelevant now, possibly thanks to the fact that greater transparency from streamers is one of the things the Writers Guild wanted while on strike, because Netflix has just a massive list of actual viewership data that it’s calling the “What We Watched” report.
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In a blog post, Netflix says it will start releasing these reports two times a year, with this inaugural list covering January to June of 2023 and featuring more than 18,000 titles in order of how many hours that users spent watching them. We’ll get to the list, but one interesting thing about this is that Netflix really doesn’t want anyone to read into these numbers too much, like, in the event that your favorite show is high up in the rankings but got canceled anyway. The blog post makes a point of saying Netflix has “enormously successful movies and TV shows with both lower and higher hours viewed” and that it doesn’t determine success based on “hours viewed alone”—in other words, Netflix is saying “please don’t get mad at us over this.”
Let’s move on to the list, which is led by Netflix original series The Night Agentreally wide margin. It was apparently the most-watched thing on Netflix in the first half of the year with 812 million hours viewed, and now that we have a ton of data, we know that that’s a fucking big-ass number. How big? Well, if you go down to just number 10 on the list (which, again, is 18,000 titles long), you get season one of FUBARmuch less, but still a lot.
But you can’t talk Netflix without talking licensed shows that aren’t originals, with Gilmore Girls’ various seasons landing pretty high on the list. Season one was viewed for 82 million hours, with each subsequent season getting about 10 million fewer hours, and there’s a similar pattern for shows like Seinfield, Friends, and The Office (this list covers Netflix across the world, so it includes things that aren’t available in all areas). Suits breaks the trend a bit, with season one getting 129 million views and subsequent seasons dropping a little further—despite the show’s much publicized popularity on Netflix.
Despite what Netflix says, the usefulness of this list is almost entirely from the way it allows you to search for your favorite canceled show or quickly abandoned movie and see how its numbers stack up to everything else. Then you can tell if Netflix was unjustly disrespectful to it and start fights about it! That’s exactly what Netflix didn’t want, but then it shouldn’t have released these numbers.