Proving once again the global appeal of Netflix's locally produced TV shows and movies, new Korean revenge thriller series The Glory, which was released on Netflix globally all the way back on Dec. 30, emerged as the platform's biggest show for the week of March 6-12, garnering nearly 125 million viewing hours worldwide.
Starring Song Hye-Kyo as a young women bent on avenging the former classmates who bullied her as a child, the Korean-language series ranked No. 1 across Asia in its first few weeks on the Netflix platform, leading Netflix's non-English-language TV category for the week of January 2-8 with 82.5 million streaming hours globally.
The Dec. 30 release was for the first batch of eight first-season episodes, and viewership seems to have been largely confined to Asia and peaked out in early February.
Last Friday, Netflix released episodes Nos. 9-16, and The Glory seems to have caught fire, ranking high not only in Asia, but across Europe and Latin America, as well. It was the No. 1 show in Mexico, Peru and El Salvador, for example.
Viewers in Netflix's biggest region, the U.S. and Canada, haven't caught on yet, but if and when they do, Netflix will have its biggest local language hit since Korea's Squid Game back in 2021.
Meanwhile, among English-language programming, back in early February, Next TV wrote that the season 4 premiere audience numbers for voyeuristic drama series You were off by 30% over season 3's debut.
We got that one wrong.
We didn't notice that for season 4 of the Penn Badgley series, Netflix had staggered the final five episodes to drop on March 9, rendering our comparative analysis between seasons three and four somewhat moot. Netflix got that "30%" viewing discrepancy back ... and probably then some.
With that second segment dropping last Thursday, You re-emerged on the charts, finishing as the No. 1 English language program for March 6-12 with 75.8 million viewing hours.
Conspiracy-minded documentary series MH370: The Plane That Disappeared finished second among English-language TV shows with nearly 60 million viewing hours.
And among Netflix films, Luther: The Fallen Sun, the movie extension of the UK TV series led by Idris Elba and his titular DCI John Luther, finished No. 1 with nearly 66 million streaming hours.
