The return of any popular series for a new season tends to instigate a mass rewatch, but even though the third run of Bridgerton premiered weeks ago on June 13th, the smash hit period drama continues to dominate the list of the most-watched TV shows on Netflix.
Enjoying another mammoth week at the summit, the long-awaited and hotly-anticipated return of Chris Van Dusen and Shonda Rhimes’ cultural juggernaut remains top of the pile by a very wide margin, hoovering up almost 93 million viewing hours from audiences around the world.
In second place is the first season of Bridgerton with over 50million hours, meaning that the opening batch of episodes and the most recent have gained as much airtime as almost the rest of the top ten combined, and that’s without even mentioning that the other two instalments in the ever-expanding universe are part of that list, too.
Bridgerton‘s second season is in fourth position, which by extension places salacious docuseries Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal as the only one of Netflix’s top-viewed quartet that isn’t a saucy period drama boasting an anachronistic soundtrack that takes a litany of modern tracks and refits them to the regency era.
Spinoff Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story has also been enjoying a resurgence in interest, but even at that, it’s slipped down to eighth position. In between, Baby Reindeer is still going strong with Richard Gadd’s dramatized account of his own experiences in fifth, just ahead of the animated Jurassic World: Chaos Theory in sixth, while Shane Gillis’ new comedy show Tires has arrived with a splash in seventh.
Irish-set murder mystery Bodkin helps bring up the rear in ninth, just ahead of superficial reality series Buying London, underlining that variety remains the spice of life among Netflix’s users’ customer base. Sure, 40% of the top ten might be Bridgerton, but everything else is hardly cut from the same cloth.
As a result, there’s a documentary about people going out of their way to have extramarital affairs, the harrowing account of an actor and comedian’s descent into self-destruction, the latest expansion of the Jurassic Park saga, a sitcom about a struggling auto repair shop, an intrepid podcaster’s visit to the ‘Emerald Isle’ that leads to the unravelling of a decades-old conspiracy, and people with very shiny teeth selling real estate all sitting pretty on the top ten.
The 10 most popular series on Netflix this week:
- Bridgerton: Season 3
- Bridgerton: Season 1
- Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal: Season 1
- Bridgerton: Season 2
- Baby Reindeer
- Jurassic World: Chaos Theory: Season 1
- Tires: Season 1
- Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story
- Bodkin: Season 1
- Buying London: Season 1
