Pictured: Full Swing, You, The Law According to Lidia Poet
Welcome to your weekly rundown of the biggest stories from Netflix’s top 10 hourly figures drop for the week ending February 19th, 2023.
Every Tuesday, Netflix updates its top 10 stats page with 40 new hourly figures of the top movies and shows of the past seven days. If you want to browse the top 10 hourly data easily, visit our tool.
Note: In this report of Netflix’s hours viewed from February 13th, 2023 to February 19th, 2023, we’ll use “Complete Viewings Equivalent,” or CVE, expressed in millions. That means we divide the hours viewed announced by Netflix by the runtime of films or series. It allows for better comparisons between films and series, but it’s not an audience metric. It is the minimum number of viewings if they were all complete from the first second to the last of the film or season.
1. You Season 4 is losing steam (a bit).
After 11 days, season 4 of You has now surpassed by season 3 and there could be a number of reasons for that.
First, the obvious one is that fewer people are watching it.
The less apparent reasons may lie in the release schedule of the series because with only five episodes to boot, there are fewer episodes to binge-watch than for Season 3. Some people may also wait for the release of the second batch of episodes to start the season, and finally, as the three previous seasons being in the Top 10 this week may be an indication of, some people are also rewatching everything (or watching for the first time). The series could count on a steady flow of new watchers in the coming weeks.
2. Full Swing swings and misses
Currently, Netflix is not in the business of buying love sports rights.
It may change at some point in the future, but for now, that’s their gospel, and they prefer to invest in documentary series about sports. It comes as a big push in the genre following the success of Formula 1: Drive to Survive which has been followed up so far in 2023 by Break Point and has plenty more projects in the works too.
Full Swing is their latest attempt and it centers on golfing. Netflix went big with it, buying an ad during the Super Bowl to promote it. But just as Drive to Survive is not a huge success in hours viewed and that Break Point did not even manage to get into a weekly Top 10, Full Swing also made a neutered launch with only 2.9 million CVEs over its first five days, one of the worst openings for a documentary series released on a Wednesday.
Full Swing CVE viewership vs other Netflix Original documentary launches
3. Perfect Match is no match for Physical: 100
Perfect Match was designed as the Avengers: Endgame of Netflix reality TV shows, featuring people from The Circle, Love is Blind, Too Hot to Handle. Its launch is not quite the sum of the viewership of its illustrious shows, with only 6.4M CVEs. Notably, that’s nearly half of what the first episodes of Physical: 100 (the Korean reality show that’s taking social media by storm) did.
Perfect Match CVE viewership vs Physical: 100
Since it’s a weekly show, we’ll see how it evolves over the next few weeks.
4. The Law According to Lidia Poet makes a decent start
The Italian procedural series The Law According to Lidia Poet did a decent start with 6.7M CVEs, the second-best launch for a European series released on a Wednesday behind the Polish series High Water.
It has all of the signs of a sleeper hit in the coming weeks so we’ll keep an eye on it.
