The most popular shows on Netflix worldwide right now are a mix of splashy returning franchises and surprising breakouts. For the second half of 2025, Wednesday Season 2 claimed the top spot among TV series with 123.9 million views after its August premiere, followed by Stranger Things Season 5 at 93.5 million views and the Eric Bana-led drama Untamed at 92.8 million views. On the all-time leaderboard, Stranger Things Season 4 still reigns as the most-watched English-language TV season ever on the platform, with a staggering 1.35 billion hours viewed, while Wednesday Season 1 sits just behind it at 1.24 billion hours. But raw numbers only tell part of the story.
Netflix’s global viewership patterns have shifted dramatically over the past two years, with non-English titles now accounting for over one-third of all viewing. Korean dramas like The Glory and Extraordinary Attorney Woo have climbed into the all-time top ten, and the weekly Top 10 charts regularly feature shows from countries that barely registered on the platform five years ago. The period from July to December 2025 saw Netflix viewers consume 96 billion total hours of content, up a billion from the first half of the year. This article breaks down the biggest titles by every metric that matters “” all-time viewership, recent performance, weekly charts, and the new releases currently reshaping the rankings.
Table of Contents
- Which Netflix Shows Have the Highest Viewership Numbers of All Time?
- What the Latest Netflix Viewership Report Reveals About Global Trends
- How Non-English Shows Are Reshaping Netflix’s Global Charts
- What Is Trending on Netflix This Week and Why It Matters
- Why Netflix Viewership Numbers Do Not Always Mean What You Think
- Returning Franchises That Continue to Dominate Netflix
- Where Netflix Viewership Is Headed in 2026 and Beyond
- Conclusion
- Frequently Asked Questions
Which Netflix Shows Have the Highest Viewership Numbers of All Time?
Netflix measures its all-time rankings by total hours viewed, and the gap between the top two titles and everything else is enormous. Stranger Things Season 4, which debuted in mid-2022, has accumulated 1.35 billion hours viewed “” a number no other English-language TV season has matched. Wednesday Season 1 follows at 1.24 billion hours, making Jenna Ortega’s deadpan Addams Family spinoff one of the fastest titles to reach that threshold. After those two, the dropoff is significant: DAHMER “” Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story collected 856.2 million hours as a limited series, and Bridgerton Season 2 landed at 656.3 million hours. What stands out about the all-time list, updated as of January 13, 2026, is how heavily non-English programming has penetrated it.
The Glory Season 1 sits at 436.9 million hours, Money Heist Part 3 at 426.4 million, and Extraordinary Attorney Woo Season 1 at 402.5 million. These are not niche curiosities “” they are mainstream global hits that competed directly with the biggest English-language productions Netflix has ever released. The implication for anyone trying to understand what “popular on Netflix” actually means is clear: you cannot ignore non-English content and still have an accurate picture. One important caveat: Netflix changed its reporting methodology in 2023, switching from a household-based metric to total hours viewed and later to “views” (defined as total hours viewed divided by runtime). That means older titles measured under the previous system and newer titles measured under the current one are not perfectly comparable. The all-time list reflects Netflix’s own standardized recalculations, but it is worth keeping that methodological shift in mind when comparing a 2022 release to a 2025 one.
What the Latest Netflix Viewership Report Reveals About Global Trends
Netflix publishes a semiannual “What We Watched” engagement report, and the second-half 2025 edition, covering July through December, delivered several surprises. Wednesday Season 2 topped all TV series with 123.9 million views, a strong performance but notably lower in raw hours than its first season’s all-time record. Stranger Things Season 5 followed at 93.5 million views, and Untamed “” a drama that flew under the radar for many North American viewers “” pulled 92.8 million views to claim the third spot. squid Game Season 3 rounded out the top four among series at 79 million views. The single most remarkable number in the entire report, however, belonged to a film. KPop Demon Hunters racked up 482 million views, making it the most-watched title “” movie or TV “” in any Netflix six-month reporting period ever.
No previous title had exceeded 165 million views in a comparable window. That is not a modest record break; it nearly tripled the previous benchmark. The film’s success underscores how unpredictable Netflix viewership can be even for the company itself, and how a title with the right cultural timing can outperform tentpole franchise releases. However, if you are looking at these numbers and assuming they translate to universal cultural awareness, be cautious. A show can rack up enormous view counts through autoplay, background viewing, and partial episode consumption without generating the kind of conversation or staying power that a lower-rated but more passionately followed series might achieve. Netflix’s own reporting does not distinguish between someone who watched all eight episodes of a series and someone who clicked away after twenty minutes. The 96 billion total hours watched in H2 2025 is a massive number, but it measures time spent, not depth of engagement.
How Non-English Shows Are Reshaping Netflix’s Global Charts
The rise of non-English content on Netflix is no longer a trend “” it is the established reality. Korean, Spanish, and Japanese content performed strongest in the second half of 2025, and non-English titles accounted for over one-third of all viewing across the platform during that period. On the weekly Top 10 chart for the week of January 27, 2026, the number-one non-English TV show was Can This Love Be Translated? with 9 million views, followed by Single’s Inferno Season 5 at 4.6 million views. These are not anomalies; the non-English chart has been consistently competitive with its English counterpart for over a year. Consider the all-time list again. The Glory, a Korean revenge thriller, reached 436.9 million hours viewed.
Money Heist Part 3, originally a Spanish-language production, hit 426.4 million. Extraordinary Attorney Woo, a Korean legal drama about an autistic lawyer, pulled 402.5 million hours. Each of these titles outperformed the vast majority of English-language Netflix originals ever produced. The practical effect is that Netflix’s content investment has followed the data “” the company now greenlights more non-English originals than at any point in its history, and those productions regularly anchor the platform’s global marketing. For viewers in English-speaking markets, this shift means the recommendation algorithm will increasingly surface subtitled and dubbed content. Whether that feels like a discovery or an annoyance depends on the viewer, but the numbers are unambiguous: audiences worldwide are watching across language barriers at a scale that would have seemed implausible a decade ago.
What Is Trending on Netflix This Week and Why It Matters
The weekly Top 10 list gives a snapshot of what is driving conversation and engagement right now, and the chart for the week of January 27, 2026, tells an interesting story about the current Netflix landscape. On the English TV side, His & Hers debuted at number one with 17.2 million views, while Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials took second with 8.7 million views. The gap between the two reflects how a buzzy new premiere can dominate the chart in its first week before settling into a more stable viewership pattern. The tradeoff with weekly charts is that they heavily favor new releases. A show that premieres in a given week will almost always outperform a title in its third or fourth week, regardless of overall quality or long-term viewership. Bridgerton Season 4 swept to the global number-one position for the week of January 26 through February 1, 2026 “” but that says as much about premiere-week dynamics as it does about the show’s staying power.
The more meaningful metric is whether a title remains on the chart for multiple weeks. A show that holds a Top 10 position for six or eight weeks is generally a bigger deal than one that spikes to number one and vanishes after two. February 2026 is stacking up as a particularly competitive month. The Lincoln Lawyer Season 4 premiered on February 5, The Night Agent Season 3 arrives on February 19, and Love Is Blind launches a new season on February 11. Each of these titles has a proven audience, which means the weekly charts will be a genuine battleground rather than a coronation for any single show. For viewers trying to decide what to watch, the weekly list is useful as a starting point, but it should not be mistaken for a quality ranking.
Why Netflix Viewership Numbers Do Not Always Mean What You Think
Netflix’s reporting has become more transparent over the past few years, but there are still significant limitations in how the data should be interpreted. The platform’s primary metric “” views, defined as total hours viewed divided by a title’s runtime “” creates an apples-to-oranges problem between short and long content. A two-hour movie and a ten-episode series are measured by the same yardstick, but a single “view” of the movie represents a fraction of the time commitment that a “view” of the series does. This is part of why KPop Demon Hunters’ 482 million views, while genuinely record-breaking, is not directly comparable to Wednesday Season 2’s 123.9 million views. There is also the question of what drives viewership versus what reflects genuine audience enthusiasm.
Netflix’s algorithm, autoplay features, and homepage placement all have enormous influence over what gets watched. A title that receives premium positioning on the Netflix homepage in 90 countries will accumulate views that a buried catalog title never could, regardless of relative quality. This does not mean the popular shows are bad “” many of them are excellent “” but it does mean that the Top 10 list is partly a reflection of Netflix’s own marketing decisions, not purely organic audience demand. For anyone using Netflix data to make decisions about what to watch, the most reliable signal is a combination of chart longevity and the all-time list. A show that appears on the weekly Top 10 for five or more weeks and eventually lands on the all-time most-watched list has genuinely resonated with a broad global audience. A show that spikes for one week and disappears may have simply benefited from a slow release calendar and aggressive promotion.
Returning Franchises That Continue to Dominate Netflix
Netflix has increasingly built its programming strategy around franchise returns, and the data validates that approach. Bridgerton is now in its fourth season and still capable of claiming the global number-one spot in its premiere week. The Night Agent, heading into Season 3, has become one of the platform’s most reliable performers. Stranger Things, even in its final season, pulled 93.5 million views in H2 2025 “” a number most new originals would envy.
Emily in Paris offers a useful case study in how Netflix evaluates franchise health. Season 5 scored 26.8 million views within its first 11 days after a December 2025 premiere, which was enough for the company to confirm a sixth season. That renewal threshold tells us something about Netflix’s internal benchmarks: a show does not need to compete with Wednesday or Stranger Things numbers to justify continuation, but it does need to demonstrate consistent audience interest across multiple seasons. The franchise model is not just about individual season performance “” it is about building a title that audiences return to reliably, which reduces the risk and marketing cost of each subsequent season.
Where Netflix Viewership Is Headed in 2026 and Beyond
The trajectory is clear: Netflix’s audience is becoming more global, more multilingual, and more comfortable watching content from unfamiliar markets. The fact that non-English titles now represent over a third of all viewing “” and that Korean, Spanish, and Japanese content leads that category “” suggests the platform’s investment in international production will only accelerate. The 96 billion hours watched in H2 2025, up from 95 billion in H1, shows that overall engagement is still growing, even if the rate of growth has slowed.
The wildcard is whether any single title can replicate the cultural-event status that Squid Game achieved in 2021 or that Wednesday captured in 2022. KPop Demon Hunters’ record-obliterating 482 million views in a single reporting period suggests the ceiling for a Netflix hit may be higher than anyone previously assumed. But predicting which title will break through at that level is essentially impossible “” Netflix greenlights hundreds of originals each year, and the ones that become genuine phenomena are almost never the ones the company expects. What the data does tell us is that the platform’s global infrastructure for distributing and promoting content across markets is more effective than ever, which means the next massive breakout could come from anywhere.
Conclusion
Netflix’s most popular shows worldwide reflect a platform that has matured into a genuinely global entertainment operation. The all-time charts are dominated by English-language juggernauts like Stranger Things Season 4 at 1.35 billion hours and Wednesday Season 1 at 1.24 billion hours, but the most recent data tells a more nuanced story “” one where Korean dramas, Spanish-language thrillers, and unexpected film breakouts like KPop Demon Hunters compete on equal footing with the biggest franchise releases. Non-English content now accounts for over a third of all viewing, and the weekly Top 10 lists consistently feature titles from multiple countries and languages. For viewers trying to figure out what to watch, the combination of the all-time list and the weekly charts provides the most useful guide.
Shows that perform well on both “” demonstrating immediate popularity and long-term staying power “” are the closest thing Netflix has to a consensus recommendation. But the numbers also make clear that popularity and personal enjoyment are different things. The most-watched show on the platform may not be the best fit for any individual viewer, and some of the most rewarding titles on Netflix never crack the Top 10 at all. Use the data as a starting point, not a prescription.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does Netflix measure its most popular shows?
Netflix uses “views,” defined as total hours viewed divided by a title’s runtime. This replaced earlier metrics based on household accounts. The company publishes weekly Top 10 lists and semiannual engagement reports covering six-month periods.
What is the most-watched Netflix show of all time?
Stranger Things Season 4 holds the record for the most-watched English-language TV season on Netflix with 1.35 billion hours viewed. Wednesday Season 1 is second at 1.24 billion hours.
What was the most-watched Netflix title in the second half of 2025?
The film KPop Demon Hunters was the single most-watched title with 482 million views “” the highest for any title in any Netflix six-month reporting period. Among TV series, Wednesday Season 2 led with 123.9 million views.
Are non-English shows really that popular on Netflix?
Yes. Non-English titles accounted for over one-third of all Netflix viewing in H2 2025, with Korean, Spanish, and Japanese content performing strongest. Several non-English series rank in the all-time top ten, including The Glory at 436.9 million hours and Money Heist Part 3 at 426.4 million hours.
How often does Netflix update its Top 10 list?
Netflix updates its global Top 10 list weekly, broken out by English TV, non-English TV, English films, and non-English films. The company also publishes a comprehensive semiannual report covering all titles watched during each six-month period.
