Mental Floss

The 25 Most Popular Shows on Netflix

By Ellen Gutoskey

(L to R) ROBERT SHEEHAN, JUSTIN H. MIN, ELLIOT PAGE, TOM HOPPER, DAVID CASTAÑEDA, and EMMY RAVER-LAMPMAN STAR IN NETFLIX'S THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY, WHICH LANDED IN THE NO. 10 SPOT.
(L to R) ROBERT SHEEHAN, JUSTIN H. MIN, ELLIOT PAGE, TOM HOPPER, DAVID CASTAÑEDA, and EMMY RAVER-LAMPMAN STAR IN NETFLIX'S THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY, WHICH LANDED IN THE NO. 10 SPOT. / CHRISTOS KALOHORIDIS/NETFLIX © 2020
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If you asked any TV watcher to name the most popular shows on Netflix, they could probably get at least a few right. Buzzy new series like The Queen’s Gambit and Bridgerton are so widely discussed that you don’t even really need a Netflix subscription to know that everyone’s watching them. In February 2020, Netflix introduced top 10 lists, so subscribers could check what was trending in their country on a daily basis. There’s the overall list—a combination of movies and TV series—as well as separate breakdowns for each of those two categories.

For the past year, Colossus contributor Travis Bean has been tracking TV’s top 10 to find out which shows are truly Netflix’s most popular offerings. Basically, he’d look at the list every day and award each show a number of points corresponding to its spot: first place gets 10 points, second place gets nine points, and so on.

His results from a year’s worth of tallying, published on Forbes, prove that U.S. subscribers definitely weren’t pretending to watch The Queen’s Gambit or Bridgerton. Those shows took second and third place, respectively—an especially impressive feat considering they were both released in late 2020, months after Bean had started his count. But neither show even came close to beating CoComelon, an educational children’s program with some of the most streamed content in YouTube’s history. The show landed in first place with 1028 points, more than 400 points ahead of The Queen’s Gambit.

It seems probable that kids stuck at home during the pandemic spent more hours watching CoComelon than they otherwise would have—much like adults passed the time streaming Tiger King, The Crown, and The Office, which all made the list, too.

Read on to find out how many of Netflix’s top 25 shows you’ve watched, and view the full list of the 50 most popular shows here.

1. CoComelon // 1028
2. The Queen’s Gambit // 621
3. Bridgerton // 504
4. Cobra Kai // 456
5. >The Office // 453
6. Tiger King // 387
7. Ozark // 377
8. >Outer Banks // 356
9. Avatar: The Last Airbender // 339
10. The Umbrella Academy // 320
11. Unsolved Mysteries // 299
11. Love Is Blind // 299
12. Virgin River // 269
13. All American // 266
14. The Crown // 264
15. Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich // 261
16. >Schitt’s Creek // 256
17. Space Force // 248
18. The Haunting of Bly Manor // 241
19. 13 Reasons Why // 233
20. Dead to Me // 230
21. Ratched // 225
22. Firefly Lane // 222
23. iCarly // 216
24. Emily in Paris // 207

[h/t Forbes]

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