The premiere last Friday of seven of the nine Season 4 episodes of Stranger Things shattered viewership records on Netflix, capturing just over 286.8 million hours of streaming on its global network.
Correction: An earlier version of this story called Season 4 the final one for Stranger Things, resulting in several cardiac events among our rabid and perhaps overly trusting readership. Obviously, we regret that error.
Stranger Things 4 Vol. 1 ranked first in 83 of the 93 countries tracked by network. The performance bested the Season 2 debut of Bridgerton back in March, which premiered to 193 million viewing hours.
The third week of Korean-language sci-fi drama Squid Game still holds the record as having the biggest viewership week ever on Netflix, recording nearly 571.8 million viewing hours during its third week on platform back on September 27 - October 3. And Squid Game is still the most watched Netflix show of all time after 28 days in rotation, capturing over 1.65 billion hours of viewing in its first four weeks.
But man, for the week of May 23-29, Stranger Things was big. Netflix's "Global Top 10 ranks its series by season, but Seasons 1-3 of Stranger Things all ranked in the top 10 for English language original series, with catchup viewing adding another 84.6 million hours to the shows total weekly viewership.
Netflix only measures streaming time on individual subscriber accounts and doesn't factor in co-viewing, meaning the actual watching time as probably much greater.
The final two Season 4 episodes of Stranger Things debut July 1
