Netflix says Wednesday just had the biggest English-language debut in the streamer’s history
Wednesday is bigger than Stranger Things, or at least it was last week
Get ready to toss out your Netflix confetti (made from shredded red envelopes and DVDs), because Netflix is having another parade in its own honor. As usual, the parade is in honor of a new thing on Netflix that got way better numbers than every other thing on Netflix, proving that Netflix is a good company that makes good stuff, and each new thing is better and more popular than the last new thing! Hip hip hooray!
So yeah, we’re as skeptical of this as we always are, but Deadline is reporting that Netflix is reporting that new Addams Family reboot/spin-off Wednesday just had the biggest week of any English-language series in Netflix history. It was apparently watched for 341 million hours in its debut, with more than 50 million households tuning in to see what Jenna Ortega’s angry goth child would be up to at the mysterious and magical Nevermore Academy. The series is directed by Tim Burton, and it also stars Gwendoline Christie, Jamie McShane, Percy Hynes White, Christina Ricci, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Luis Guzmán.
The previous English-language record-holder was the first block of episodes for Stranger Things’ fourth season, which were viewed for 335 million hours at their highest. The current record-holder overall, separated from the English-language (and its bizarrely inconsistent grammatical rules), is Squid Game, which was watched for 571 million hours in its highest week. These numbers all come from Netflix, and “hours watched” is kind of a purposefully vague metric that has nothing to do with how a viewer felt about the thing they watched or even how much of the thing they actually watched—we know 50 million households put Wednesday on, but what if 10 of them watched 300 hours and the other 40 only watched one hour? That would be confusing data!