Pictured: You, The Glory and Luther: The Fallen Sun – Pictures courtesy of Netflix
Welcome to your weekly rundown of the biggest stories from Netflix’s top 10 hourly figures drop for the week ending March 12th, 2023. This week we’ll discuss You, The Glory, Luther: The Fallen Sun, Chris Rock: Selective Outrage, and even Wednesday.
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 March 6th, 2023, to March 12th, 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. A tale of two returning series: You and The Glory
Two series with a season broken in two were back last week.
The first one up is You returning with season 4B four weeks after the first part. The tricky thing with You is that, per Netflix’s methodology, they do not distinguish the hours viewed between parts A and B. So we have virtually no way of knowing precisely how well the second part launched.
However, we can compare the hours viewed of Season 4 for the last 5 weeks, and it is quite concerning for You.
You Season 4 CVE viewership over 5 weeks
As we can see here, the viewing numbers for the launch of the recent five episodes and the first five episodes last week are less important than the launch of the first five episodes of season 4 over its first four days. It might pick up next week, but for now, that’s quite a lackluster part of season 4B, and one might wonder why Netflix would split up into two parts (except for the obvious reason of making sure US audiences are still subscribed at the end of March) because in this case, it probably did the series a disservice.
Luckily for You, numbers are on its side, as Netflix has never canceled a fiction series after season 4. Some had a final fourth season decided in advance, and the others were renewed, so I will go with a renewal for a final season.
From the other side of the world, The Glory also came back with the second part of its first season, two months and a half after the launch of the first part. In this case, however, we can study how part 2 is doing compared to part 1 since we have a bonus number: the all-time Top 10 one.
I won’t bore you with the details and the maths, but let’s just say that the series came back with a huge bang. The first part logged 3.8M CVEs over its first three days while Part B scored more than 14M CVEs over the same period.
The Glory Part A vs Part B CVE Viewership
We will be able to monitor the distinction between Part 1 and Part 2 over the next three weeks and a half, at which point we will know for sure the size of its success.
2. Luther is breaking out this week.
Luther: The Fallen Sun is rising high in the sky with more than 30M CVEs over its first three days. That’s the best launch for any UK film (unless you count Enola Holmes 2 as a British film, but I don’t) in the dataset.
Luther: The Fallen Sun vs other Netflix movies CVE Viewership
The combination of a known IP plus Idris Elba and quite a good reception from the audience might have helped, but it’s higher than I would have thought.
3. Chris Rock: Selective Outrage is finally here.
After its no-show in its first weekend (partly because Netflix categorizes the special among TV series that are way longer and also because the special was not available at launch for anyone subscribed to Netflix without English as its preferred language of interface), Chris Rock’s Selective Outrage is in the charts this week. It did really well to the tune of 17.8M CVEs well, to be precise.
That’s quite an accomplishment for which it is hard to offer meaningful comparisons, but let’s say it’s good.
4. Goodbye, Wednesday
Picture: Netflix
It took 15 weeks, but Wednesday is out of the charts for the first time since its release.
The huge success exits the visible part of the Top 10 universe with a total of 258.7 million CVEs in 15 weeks, a feat only beaten by the juggernaut that is Squid Game.
That was an unexpected scenario from the get-go; even Jenna Ortega could not have (re)written it better.
