With its second stanza of four episodes premiering on Nov. 29, Squid Game: The Challenge drew a solid 85 million viewing hours on Netflix's measured global platform last week, which was flat with the reality competition spinoff's premiere a week earlier.
Catch-up viewing for the original Squid Game scripted sci-fi series, meanwhile, also stayed relatively stable, ending the week at No. 7 ranked for non-English series with 12.7 million viewing hours.
But overall, across weekly top-10 rankings for its four programming categories, there 42% fewer hours spent watching Netflix from Nov. 27 - Dec. 3 than there were for the comparable week of 2022. Rendering last week's YoY comparison especially tough: For the week of November 28 - December 4, 2022, Tim Burton comedy-horror series Wednesday captured more than 411 million viewing hours.
With 2023 winding down, only one Netflix movie or TV show so far this year, Shawn Ryan's The Night Agent, has had a week in which it drew more than 200 million viewing hours.
Next TV began tracking this downward Netflix ratings trend back in June.
Netflix continues to struggle in the movie categories. The Adam Sandler-voiced animated comedy Leo captured 42.1 million viewing hours to lead Netflix's English-language film quadrant last week, but it dropped 30% of its premiere week audience.
Back in English-language series, medical-themed docu-series Bad Surgeon: Love Under the Knife debuted to just 19.8 million hours streamed. The series follows the investigation into Paolo Macchiarini, a surgeon once lauded as a brilliant pioneer, only to be later revealed as a fraud.
But there was some good news.
Sony Pictures TV's Obliterated -- a low-budget, special-forces-themed action-comedy series from the creative trio behind Cobra Kai -- debuted to 47.6 million streaming hours. That's not shabby, considering just how little promotion and awareness this series with the no-name cast came in with.
Meanwhile, Warner Bros. Discovery's abandonment of the streaming wars and return to being quarterly-balance-sheet-inspired third-party program supplier has benefitted Netflix in the form of off-CBS spinoff comedy series Young Sheldon, with seasons 1 and 2 combining to deliver 31.4 million total viewing hours to the platform last week.
Meanwhile, among non-English TV shows, Netflix generated 47.7 million streaming hours with Swedish limited drama series A Nearly Normal Family.
