Top 10 Popular and Most-Watched Netflix Series, Revealed

Netflix did something they'd never done this week by revealing the most popular films and TV series on their platform.

At this year's Code conference, Netflix co-CEO and chief content officer Ted Sarandos shared some data which is usually kept private, and the results were very interesting.

One slide in particular shared the Top 10 series and films on the platform based on the number of accounts that watched at least two minutes of each title within the first 28 days it was released.

Bridgerton: Season 1 reigned over all the series in first place, with 82 million accounts, while Lupin: Part 1 came in second place with 76 million accounts. The Witcher: Season 1 tied with Lupin, while Sex/Life: Season 1 and Stranger Things season 3 came tied at 67 million accounts. The bizarre docuseries, Tiger King, which was all anyone could talk about during lockdown, surprisingly only came in at seventh place, attracting 64 million accounts.

1. Bridgerton: Season 1 - 82 million

Photo: Netflix

The eight-episode drama, which premiered on Netflix on Christmas Day, was created by Chris Van Dusen, who previously wrote for the Shonda Rhimes shows Scandal and Grey's Anatomy. It's also the first scripted product of Rhimes' deal with Netflix from her production company, Shondaland. Bridgerton is an adaptation of mostly the first book in a successful series of eight Regency romance novels by Julia Quinn. Taking place in the early part of the 19th century, the books follow the eight siblings in the Bridgerton family, four boys and four girls, as they seek the loves of their lives.

Shondaland makes television and makes it well. There are eight episodes of Bridgerton, and they all have endings that are like chapters in a good book: They leave you in a spot where you just want to read one more chapter before you turn off the light for the night. The end of the season concludes several stories, teases several more and has a couple of delicious mic-drop moments.

2. Lupin: Part 1 - 76 million

Photo: Netflix

Created by George Kay in collaboration with François Uzan, both the show and the character of Assane take their inspiration from Arsène Lupin, a gentleman thief created in 1905 by French author Maurice Leblanc. Assane’s Senegalese-immigrant father Babakar (Fargass Assandé) gave him a Lupin novel at a formative age, and Assane treats the Lupin stories as his own personal Bible. (In a flashback, he even hides one of the books inside the hollowed-out pages of an actual Bible to get away with reading it at school.) Assane will perform spectacular crimes, and gain revenge against wealthy businessman Hubert Pellegrini (Hervé Pierre), whom he blames for Babakar’s death. But he will do it with style, just like his literary hero.

Kay, Uzan, and directors Louis Leterrier and Marcela Said do an impressive job of keeping the tone mostly light while also treating Assane’s quest to hurt Pellegrini — and the collateral damage caused by this mission — with the utmost gravity. The story bounces around in time, not only showing us Assane’s childhood before and after Babakar’s death, but revisiting aspects of each heist afterward to reveal exactly how he pulled it off. (In that respect, Leterrier’s experience directing the first Now You See Me film comes in very handy.) This kind of fractured narrative could easily get confusing, but the story itself has so much energy that it all flows together nicely. The show even pulls off the neat trick of making subplots about Assane’s ex-wife Claire (Ludivine Sagnier) and often-neglected teenage son Raoul (Etan Simon) feel vital to understanding and appreciating Assane, when on other genre shows, this kind of material can feel like a buzzkill distraction from the reason we’re all here.

3. The Witcher: Season 1 - 76 million

Photo: Netflix

Piecing together what’s going on at any given time in “The Witcher” is both impossible and insignificant. Netflix’s big-budget fantasy adaptation looks like “Game of Thrones” and plays like “The OA” — an extravagant budget fueling a ludicrous premise. Frankly, it should be a catastrophe, and yet the batshit energy driving a slew of increasingly odd choices makes for a pretty entertaining spectacle.

Based on Andrzej Sapkowski’s books (which have already been adapted into a popular video game series), “The Witcher” tells the wild tales of Geralt of Rivia, the eponymous witcher played by “Witcher” enthusiast Henry Cavill, who travels from town to town accepting missions in exchange for “coin.” Usually his quests are focused on killing a monster. Sometimes they involve taking baths — which are, surprisingly, an extremely important act for anyone who loves the “Witcher” video games and books.

“The Witcher” isn’t for everyone, and it’s not trying to be. The soapy scheming that drove people to choose sides in “Game of Thrones” isn’t here. Neither is the tender romance of “Outlander,” the big-minded ambition of “The OA,” or the coherence of, I don’t know, “Vikings.” But that’s OK. “The Witcher” is “The Witcher,” and nothing else matters. Just go with it.

4. Sex/Life Season 1 - 67 million

Photo: Netflix

Sex/Life is an American drama streaming television series created by Stacy Rukeyser for Netflix. The series is inspired by the novel 44 Chapters About 4 Men by BB Easton and it premiered on June 25, 2021. In September 2021, the series was renewed for a second season.

Based on the book "44 Chapters About 4 Men" by BB Easton, the eight-episode series highlights Shahi as Billie Connelly, apparently carrying on with the truth of rural ecstasy with her two little children and spouse, Cooper (Mike Vogel), a thriving Master of the Universe whose profession has outweighed her own.

Appearances to the side, Cooper has become someone of little interest in their conjugal bed, provoking Billie to start thinking back and fantasizing about her lighthearted, club-jumping youth as a lonely woman in Manhattan with friend Sasha (Margaret Odette), who's carrying on with that life while reminding Billie how great she has it.

Billie, notwithstanding, is less persuaded, considering previous beau Brad (Adam Demos), with whom she appreciated soul-breaking, spine-twitching, gauzy medley commendable adventures, even, composing a diary specifying their affairs that her husband, normally, finds.

Nor Brad remain stringently an illusion of Billie's past, returning into her circle in a sudden way that tests her rehashed demand about how cheerful she is and what a magnificent life she and Cooper have constructed together.

5. Stranger Things 3 - 67 million

Photo: Netflix

Returning after a nearly two-year break, Stranger Things 3 is as Stranger Things-y as ever, which is both good and bad. It’s nice to see all these characters again. It’s also fun to once again be immersed in the supremely retro setting — this season takes place during the summer of 1985 and, for large portions, in Hawkins, Indiana’s brand new Starcourt Mall, home to a Waldenbooks and a Sam Goody and a Time Out arcade.

Without a ton of pre-release press (the better to maintain its mystique), the Duffer Brothers’ “Stranger Things” seemed to pop out of nowhere — a burst of a summer blockbuster sliced into palatable “chapters” like an addictive page-turner of an adventure book. Its 1983 setting, complete with myriad throwback references, was perfectly calibrated to tap into the significant strain of TV and movie fans who yearn for the onscreen “Goonies” adventures (or even star Winona Ryder) of their youth. For a while it was just about impossible to escape the show’s signature images: an intrepid Dungeons and Dragons party (played by Finn Wolfhard, Noah Schnapp, Caleb McLaughlin, and Gaten Matarazzo), a frantic mother (Ryder) and surly sheriff (David Harbour) decoding a wall of blinking lights, telekinetic heroine Eleven (breakout Millie Bobby Brown), glaring with a shorn head, steadily bleeding nose, and perhaps an Eggo waffle for extra strength.

6. Money Heist: Part 4 - 65 million

Photo: Netflix

A master criminal called The Professor (Alvaro Morte) assembled a team of eight master criminals to take over the royal mint in Spain, dressed in red jumpsuits with Dali masks. They named themselves after international cities: there was Rio (Miguel Herran), an IT whizz; Nairobi (Alba Flores), a forger; Moscow (Paco Tous), an former miner turned criminal; etc. Once inside, they could print money for as long as they can hold out against the police, their hostages and their own internal strife.

The series was as slickly executed as the heist. It had everything a heist needs; wild ingenuity, loveable rogues and a clear sense of physical geography. Except for The Professor, the gang were inside, surrounded by the cops. It was a post-crash thriller, with a Robin Hood moral angle. Not only were we rooting for them, but they might actually be the good guys. Flashbacks gave context to the gang’s travails as they played cat and mouse with the police, led by Raquel Murillo (Itziar Ituño). Each revealed hidden depths, especially the psychopathic aesthete Berlin (Pedro Alonso).

7. Tiger King: Season 1 - 64 million

Photo: Netflix

Tiger King is one of the strongest contenders for most watchable TV show of the year, and it’s a problem. A documentary miniseries comprising seven quick episodes, each under an hour, you could watch the whole thing in a weekend; given the subject, you’ll probably finish even faster.

The Netflix series follows a man both larger than life and smothered by it: Joe Exotic, the one-time owner of a successful-seeming private zoo with over 200 tigers and other big cats. He’s a man who ran for president of the United States, then governor of Oklahoma, and then sometime after, may have tried to hire someone to kill his nemesis, a woman dedicated to shutting his zoo down. It’s incredibly compelling, and terribly so: Tiger King is almost wholly dedicated to spectacle, with little interest in any sense of truth. And the truth is about as gutting as Tiger King is sensational.

As the eponymous Tiger King, Joe Exotic is magnetic: a ball-capped, mulleted man who swaggers with a knee brace and a drawl, wearing some combination of fringe vests, chaps, and bedazzled shirts at all times. You’ve never seen anyone on television like him. Born Joe Schreibvogel, the man’s eccentricities are accompanied by a tragic backstory that Tiger King will deliver piecemeal and in passing. For the first few episodes, we meet him more or less fully formed: a man who has built a small empire with his larger-than-life personality and his equally large cats — an empire that, somehow, crumbled and landed him in prison.

8. The Queen's Gambit - 62 million

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If you were to pick, at first glance, the television hit of fall 2020, it would probably not be The Queen’s Gambit. The lush seven-part Netflix miniseries from Godless creator Scott Frank and Allan Scott, released in October, doesn’t contain the obvious genre components or zaniness of a runaway Netflix hit. It’s the adaptation of a well-reviewed if not widely known 1983 novel of the same name by Walter Tevis, a cold war period piece about an orphaned girl who is adept at chess – a cerebral and certainly high-stakes game, but not an activity renowned for its visual drama.

And yet, as of this week The Queen’s Gambit is Netflix’s most-watched scripted limited series to date – a slightly convoluted and dubious record, given that Netflix measures a “view” as anything more than two minutes of content, but still, attracting 62 million account viewers during its first month is an impressive feat. (For comparison, Tiger King, the docuseries on America’s private exotic zoos that blew up at the outset of quarantine, drew 64 million account viewers in its first month.)

How to explain the surprising dominance of a period miniseries about one girl’s inexorable rise to the heights of international chess prestige? For anyone who’s fallen into it – and with the entire show released at once mere weeks before a bruising and protracted US election, The Queen’s Gambit was ripe binge material – the answer is in the immersion. The Queen’s Gambit is grade-A escapism: a classic sports underdog story injected with Netflix capital, an uncomplicated pleasure of sumptuous, meticulous styling, a soothing portal into another world which believes in talent as the one invincible currency.

9. Sweet Tooth: Season 1 - 60 million

Photo: Netflix

Netflix has lately been met with varying degrees of success with pure genre serial storytelling — shows that dig deep into surreality and find within it some level of heart. These are shows less like “Stranger Things,” which is built to have a broad, near-universally-understandable appeal, than like “The Umbrella Academy,” unapologetically niche.

Within this realm, “Sweet Tooth” is a relatively successful outing. Netflix’s new series assays a world a decade after the so-called “Great Crumble,” a society-restructuring pandemic that coincided with a change in the species. No one knows to what degree, if at all, this shift is related, but all new babies born since the Crumble are hybridized with animals, giving rise to babies with animal features that society is ill-prepared to deal with, despite their cuteness. Young Gus (Christian Convery), a boy with elements of deer including big antlers, had been hiding in the woods with his father (Will Forte); suddenly left on his own, he enters the company of a solo rambler (Nonso Anozie, excellent and gruff) and sets out on an adventure across a ruined, reclaimed America.

10. Emily In Paris: Season 1 - 58 million

Photo: Netflix

Emily in Paris is an American comedy-drama streaming television series created by Darren Star, which premiered on Netflix on October 2, 2020. The series stars Lily Collins as the eponymous Emily, an American who moves to Paris to provide an American point of view to Savoir, a French marketing firm. There, she struggles to succeed in the workplace while searching for love and experiencing a culture clash with her "boring" and mundane Midwestern U.S. upbringing. It also stars Ashley Park, Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu, Lucas Bravo, Samuel Arnold, Camille Razat, and Bruno Gouery.

In November 2020, the series was renewed for a second season by Netflix and filming started in May 2021. The second season is scheduled to premiere on December 22, 2021.

Emily in Paris follows Emily, a driven 20-something American from Chicago who moves to Paris for an unexpected job opportunity. She is tasked with bringing an American point of view to a venerable French marketing firm. Cultures clash as she adjusts to the challenges of life in Paris while juggling her career, new friendships and love life.

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