The Korean survival drama has accumulated more viewing hours than any other show on the platform – and its cultural staying power, measured in weeks spent in the global top ten, is equally unmatched.
Since Netflix began publishing its viewing figures in earnest, the scale of what constitutes a genuinely global hit has become easier to quantify – and harder to comprehend. A new analysis by Sweepstakes Table draws on Netflix’s official weekly Top 10 data from 2021 to 2025 to rank the platform’s most-watched series by total hours viewed, identify which shows maintained the longest presence in the global top ten, and gauge which upcoming 2026 releases have generated the most audience anticipation.
The findings confirm some widely held assumptions about streaming success – and challenge a few others.
The Most-Watched Series Since 2021
Squid Game sits at the top of the rankings with 5.048 billion hours viewed – a figure that places it in a category of its own among streaming series. The South Korean survival drama, which follows contestants competing in deadly children’s games for an enormous cash prize, became a genuine cultural phenomenon on its 2021 release, generating social media challenges, Halloween costume trends, and mainstream conversation well beyond the typical boundaries of subtitled foreign-language content.
Its success represented a significant moment for international programming. By demonstrating that a non-English series could not only compete with but decisively outperform Western productions on a global platform, Squid Game changed the calculus for both Netflix and the broader industry around the commercial viability of international content.
Stranger Things follows in second place with 3.162 billion hours. The nostalgic science fiction series has sustained its audience across four seasons, with its final season releasing in 2025. A strategy of splitting the final season into parts extended its presence in the cultural conversation, keeping viewer engagement elevated over a longer period than a conventional full-season drop would typically achieve.
Wednesday rounds out the top three with 2.931 billion hours. The Addams Family spin-off, centred on the iconic character navigating a boarding school for social outcasts, combined a recognisable IP with a contemporary coming-of-age format. Jenna Ortega’s performance and the series’ gothic visual identity generated strong social media engagement and drew audiences across age groups.
Bridgerton (2.279 billion hours), Ginny & Georgia (1.556 billion), You (1.542 billion), Love Is Blind (1.404 billion), Manifest (1.320 billion), The Night Agent (1.307 billion), and Outer Banks (1.275 billion) complete the top ten – a list that spans genres from period romance to thriller to teen adventure, suggesting that the ingredients for mass streaming viewership are less genre-specific than they are execution-dependent.
Which Shows Stayed in the Top Ten Longest
Total hours viewed captures initial impact but not necessarily sustained engagement. A separate metric – cumulative weeks spent in Netflix’s global top ten – reveals a slightly different picture of which series genuinely held audiences over time.
Squid Game leads again, with 32 weeks in the global top ten – more than any other series in the dataset. Its combination of water-cooler conversation, an unresolved second-season question, and international cultural spread kept it circulating well after most viewers had finished the episodes.
Yo soy Betty, la fea – the Colombian telenovela that originally aired in the late 1990s – spent 30 weeks in the top ten after finding a new global audience on Netflix. Its performance is among the study’s more striking data points: a series made over two decades ago, in Spanish, sustaining top ten placement for the better part of a year when introduced to viewers who had never encountered it.
Wednesday and Café con aroma de mujer, another Latin American telenovela, each logged 28 weeks in the top ten. Manifest and the children’s educational series Ms. Rachel both recorded 25 weeks – the former driven by audience catch-up after years of social media discussion about its cliffhanger endings, the latter by consistent repeat viewing among its young audience.
The top ten longest streaks feature a notably high representation of Spanish-language content – Korean dramas and Latin American telenovelas account for a significant share of the cumulative weeks tallied – pointing to the depth of loyalty those formats generate within their core audiences and their capacity to travel across language barriers when the platform’s recommendation systems surface them to new viewers.
The Most Anticipated Shows of 2026
To measure forward-looking audience interest, the study analysed Google search volume for upcoming 2026 Netflix series between November 2024 and October 2025. The results suggest that viewer anticipation is concentrated heavily around returning properties rather than new ones.
Virgin River leads with 171,000 average monthly searches. The small-town romance series has built a reliable following across multiple seasons, and its comfort-viewing appeal – predictable in the best sense, with a loyal audience that returns rather than samples – generates strong pre-release demand. XO Kitty follows at 165,000 searches, with Outer Banks third at 162,000.
One Piece (135,000 searches) and 3 Body Problem (112,000 searches) represent the highest-anticipated entries with significant pre-existing fanbases from source material – a manga and a novel trilogy respectively – that are likely driving a substantial portion of their search volume independently of the Netflix adaptation.
The broader pattern across the anticipation rankings is clear: audiences searching for 2026 releases are predominantly looking for more of what they already know. Seven of the ten most-searched upcoming series are returning seasons rather than new properties, reinforcing an industry-wide observation that multi-season loyalty is the most durable form of streaming engagement.
What the Data Suggests About Streaming Success
The study’s overall findings point to several consistent patterns. Shows that generate genuine cultural conversation – something to discuss, debate, or react to – accumulate viewing hours at a rate that more conventional entertainment rarely achieves. International content, when it connects thematically across cultural contexts, faces fewer barriers than the industry long assumed. And the series that sustain top ten placement longest are typically those that give audiences reasons to return – through cliffhangers, social media discussion, or the reliable comfort of a format that has already earned trust over previous seasons.
Whether a show enters the cultural conversation through shock, nostalgia, aesthetic distinctiveness, or the accumulated goodwill of a multi-season relationship with its audience, the underlying mechanism appears to be the same: it gives people something to talk about beyond the screen.
