The second half of the fourth and final season of Manifest captured nearly 78.2 million hours of viewing on Netflix's global platform from June 5-11, making it the most watched program in subscription streaming last week.
The Warner Bros. TV-produced sci-fi series about a commercial plane that mysteriously disappears, then even more mysteriously reappears, was cancelled by NBC after season 3. But it has been a sometimes spectacular and consistently steady audience getter for Netflix since it acquired exclusive streaming rights to the show two years ago, then agreed to co-produce a fourth campaign.
Also read: ‘Manifest’ Creator Jeff Rake Thanks Fans For Sticking With Show Amidst Its Indirect Flight
In fact, the case could be made that Manifest is Netflix's most enduring ratings hit ever.
Seriously. Stick with me for a second here.
Manifest: Season 1 has ranked among Netflix's weekly top 10 most watched English-language TV series a record 25 times since the streaming company started keeping public rankings on June 28, 2021.
This includes last week, when catchup-viewing for the just released (June 2) second volume of season 4 drove season 1 to nearly 18.2 million streaming hours (and a fifth place finish, since Netflix ranks shows by season).
Netflix actually debuted the first two seasons of Manifest on June 10, 2021, during which the series was the most-watched program in U.S. subscription streaming, according to Nielsen.
Netflix wouldn't launch its global ranker until 18 days later, but unofficially, season 1 has probably tallied 27 weeks in Netflix's top 10 most watched list for English language shows. No Netflix English-language series -- not even the powerful likes of Bridgerton or Stranger Things -- has accomplished that.
(Ironically, Manifest was five days into its incendiary Netflix run when NBC announced that there would back a season 4.)
Manifest doesn't actually hold the record for most top 10 appearances. In Netflix's non-English-language TV series rankings, Spanish-language series Yo soy Betty, la fea has shown up over 30 times, for example.
And no season of Manifest has come close to cracking Netflix's preferred all-time ran rankings method -- performance in the first 28 days of release. Also, Manifest doesn't seem to have ever generated a boffo Stranger Things-like weekly performance in which it surpassed something like 400 million viewing hours (although we don't have insight into those first two weeks back in June 2021).
The biggest Manifest weekly performance on Netflix we can find since Jun 28, 2021 came last week for season 4, volume 2.
But cumulatively, over time, four seasons of Manifest have manifested a lot of streaming over the past two years for Netflix, with the show so consistently ranking among the platform's most watched programs from week to week.
