David E. Kelley-produced legal drama series The Lincoln Lawyer delivered 55.2 million viewing hours last week across Netflix's measurable global platform, making it the service's most streamed English-language show last week.
It was a decent rally for the series, which dropped the final five episodes of its 10-installment second season on August 3. The first five episodes of season 2 premiered back on July 6 producing a very anemic 31.4 million streaming hours in their first four days on the platform.
With season 2 of the Michael Connolly novel adaptation now fully deployed, catchup viewing of The Lincoln Lawyer: Season 1 also surged to 17.4 million hours.
Meanwhile, the season 2 debut of young adult-targeted, LGBTQ-themed romantic drama Heartstopper claimed a second-place finish on Netflix's English-language series ranker for the week of July 31 - August 6, delivering 28.5 million viewing hours — almost exactly double the first-four-day engagement captured by the show's April 2022 series premiere.
Among Netflix films, week 2 of Jackie Chan-John Cena buddy actioner Hidden Strike — as hamfisted a Chinese-American co-production as was ever shot on camera and clumsily doused in CGI — perked up slightly to 40.5 million viewing hours.
But it was for nominal benefit in terms of ending a prolonged viewership drought on Netflix.
Comparing the “English-language series” quadrant for Netflix’s Global Top 10 rankings last week to the same cohort for the first week of August in 2022, Next TV found that total viewing minutes were down 42% year over year.
There is some distortion to the numbers here. In June, Netflix started ranking its series and movies based on total “views” and not on hours viewed. So it's possible that some shows with higher total hour marks were left out of the four top 10 lists. But no way that this accounts for 42%.
Viewership on the top streaming platform is way down right now. Soon, a bigger pub than ours will report this … and it’ll be a thing. But you heard it here first.
With SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes continuing to kneecap Hollywood’s production engine, Netflix has been algorithmically pushing Korean TV series on users, who are eating this stuff up.
Also read: Netflix’s Red-Hot Subtitle Summer: Viewing of Local-Language Shows Is Up 30% Over the Last 7 Weeks
Korean romantic drama King the Land was once again Netflix’s most-watched show last week, building its audience to an all-time high viewership mark of 66.4 million streaming hours … after eight weeks on the platform.
Again, year-to-year comparisons of Netflix rankers are a little wonky due to the shift to ranking based on views, but viewing hours of non-English-language shows was down only 12.6% vs. August 1-7, 2022.
Notably, the period was marked by the build-up of another Korean young-adult drama, Extraordinary Attorney Woo, so the comparables aren’t easy.
