Investing our time on the ol’ elliptical bike last week in what was, at the time, the No. 1 show on Netflix, Ryan Murphy’s dark, mystery who-doin'-it? drama The Watcher, Next TV had slogged through episodes 1 and 2, but was hooked by installment No. 3.
Who’s writing those strange, ominous letters — read aloud to us in creepy voice alteration — to the new and now-very-freaked-out homeowners at 657 Boulevard? Is it extreme preservationist Mia Farrow? Is duplicitous real estate agent Jennifer Coolidge? Are Bobby Cannavale and Naomi Watts going to keep the house? Will they go bankrupt? Are they going to stay married? Is Cannavale going to go bonkers like the earlier homeowner and kill his whole family?
Sooo many questions.
But we'll tell you what we won't question anymore: If a consensus of critics aggregates a 53% score for a Netflix limited series on Rotten Tomatoes, Next TV will no longer second-guess that … and breathlessly jump the gun at episode 3 and waste valuable credibility and time breathlessly tweeting to the friends, family members and hangers-on who can still stand us … that they simply must watch The Watcher.
In case you’re one of those people who simply must taste the milk just to see for yourself how sour it really is, we won’t spoil it for you. We’ll just say that The Watcher flames out bad — real bad — in its seventh and final episode.
Many Netflix members must agree with Next TV. The series, which led Netflix last week with more than 148 million hours of viewing, lost 55% of its audience and finished the week of October 24-31 with just 67.5 million viewing hours.
Displacing it at No. 1 was From Scratch, a romantic limited-series drama starring Zoe Saldaña as a young American falling in love with a Sicilian while studying abroad in Italy. From Scratch dropped on Netflix on Oct. 21 and more than doubled its audience to more than 72 million viewing hours last week, leading all programs on the platform.
From Scratch enjoys a rare attribute among Netflix shows — a good Rotten Tomatoes score of 92%.
The second biggest audience generated on Netflix from Oct. 24-30 came from original English-language film The Good Nurse. Based on the true story of serial-killing health-care worker Charles Cullen, the movie starring Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne scored 68.3 million viewing hours, usurping last week’s audience champ on Netflix, ensemble fantasy-action film The School for Good and Evil, which dropped nearly half of its viewership.
Notably, Netflix’s most recent adaption of World War I classic All Quiet on the Western Front — shot in the Czech Republic in a combination of German and English — led the non-English films lists for the week with 31.5 million viewing hours. Seems like a disappointing global performance to us.
Meanwhile, the Netflix debut of Colombian comedy series Til Death Do Us Part popped a little in non-English TV shows, leading that list with nearly 51.5 million viewing hours.
Here's charts for you to look at:
