Season 2 of Netflix's The Lincoln Lawyer crashed and burned even more dramatically last week than it did for its bummer opening the week prior, drawing just 35.3 million hours viewed. That compares super-unfavorably to the 108.1 million streaming hours the show pulled in for the second week of its first season back in May 2022.
In the parlance of producer David E. Kelly's latest legal drama, that's the kind of performance that can get you disbarred.
When Next TV spoke with Netflix earlier in June, asking the company about its first-half-of-2023 viewership slump, company press reps specifically referenced The Lincoln Lawyer: Season 2 as one of the shows they were counting on to kickstart viewing in the second half of 2023.
It's clear that they're now in a tough spot.
Total viewing for Netflix's top 10 English-language TV series category last week was down more than 200 million hours from the same week of July last year.
And with writers and actors striking for what may be the rest of the summer, Netflix is going to have a tough time turning this momentum around.
That's not to say the week was completely bereft of success for Netflix.
With the dual strikes sapping its Western library, Netflix generated more heat with its locally produced Korean content. And in its fifth week on Netflix, season 1 of Korean romantic comedy King of the Land led the SVOD's global platform with 51.8 million viewing hours.
Last week’s Netflix Global Top 10 also included the arrival of several new, promising shows. Notable was the Peyton Manning-produced reality NFL series Quarterback. The show, which tracks the week-to-week regular-season lives of league signal-calling stars Patrick Mahomes, Kirk Cousins and Marcus Mariota, generated 21.4 million viewing hours in its first four days on the platform.
That compared favorably to the 25.8 million streaming hours generated in the first week back in February by another Netflix sports reality show, season 5 of Formula 1: Drive to Survive, which has already established itself as a global hit.
Quarterback has already been renewed for a second season, Manning recently said.
Meanwhile, the debut of half-hour comedy Survival of the Thickest, which stars Michelle Buteau as a plus-sized New York stylist/influencer rebuilding her life while coming out of a long relationship, finished ahead of Quarterback in the new metric Netflix now prioritizes, number of views.
Survival of the Thickest finished with 3.7 million views for the week of July 10-16 vs. just 3.3 million for Quarterback.
The introduction of this metric is useful for comparing hourlong and half-hour shows.
Though the introductions of Survival and Quarterback represented modest successes for Netflix, neither of these shows come close to constituting the huge hit the platform currently needs to get out of its slump.
Original film The Out-Laws, which generated a modest 46.3 million viewing hours, was one of Netflix’s few titles that saw a bump in viewership from last week, with viewership up 28% over premiere week.
Meanwhile, Bird Box Barcelona, a spinoff of Netflix’s wildly successful 2018 Sandra Bullock film Bird Box, amassed only 30.5 million hours viewed and 16.3 million views. This is less than a tenth of the 325.3 million hours viewers spent watching the original Bird Box, which remains one of Netflix’s top 10 most popular films of all time.
