New Netflix series ‘Dark Winds’ lands perfect critic score
Last month, Netflix added 13 AMC shows to its catalogue, including a highly-rated thriller series called Dark Winds.
Created by Graham Roland, Dark Winds borrows its story from a number of novels by Tony Hillerman. The books followed Navajo police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee through various cases and crimes, from plane crashes to mysterious murders.
The series adapts these stories to television, with Zahn McClarnon and Kiowa Gordon starring as Leaphorn and Chee respectively. Jessica Matten, Rainn Wilson, and Noah Emmerich also appear in the series, while directors include Chris Eyre, Sanford Bookstaver, and showrunner John Wirth.
The first instalment of the thriller series hit AMC in the summer of 2022, receiving widespread critical acclaim. It still boasts a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes. The second season, which showed on AMC last year, has received similar praise. It also received an 100 per cent score on the film-rating website.
As part of a wider AMC drop, both season of Dark Winds arrived on Netflix. Other AMC shows that arrived on the streaming site included The Walking Dead spin-off shows Fear the Walking Dead and The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, and comedy series Kevin Can F**k Himself.
Dark Winds immediately performed well on Netflix. The thriller series arrived on the streaming service on August 19th. In its first week of streaming, it was the sixth most-watched series on the platform, amassing 10 million hours of viewing on its first season. It placed just behind the new, UK-based season of reality series Love Is Blind.
The season managed to stay in the top ten for two weeks, slipping down to the tenth spot in its second week of streaming. It still managed to amass an impressive 6.9 million hours viewed, an impressive feat given the shows it was up against.
The series is yet to return to the top ten, which has been dominated by more established Netflix offerings like the fourth season of Parisian dramedy Emily in Paris and a new instalment of the realtor reality show Selling Sunset.
For those who have been taken in by the thriller series and are hoping for more Leaphorn and Chee, the series has already received the green light for a new season. Last autumn, following the success of the second instalment, Dark Winds was confirmed for a third season.
A release date is yet to be announced for the third instalment, though it was initially expected to arrive in 2025.