Netflix What We Watched: report on viewing habits for first 6 months of 2023 shows top series and films

A massive Netflix report detailing audience habits for the period of January to June 2023 has been released, and there’s plenty to dig into. The report, which records the number of hours streamed for all titles on the platform with more than 50,000 hours viewed, contains information on over 18,000 films and TV shows.

The report includes the most watched show of the six month period, as well as the top films, foreign titles, and licensed content, and provides information on the use of subtitles and dubbing.

Some of the most popular titles may come as a surprise for UK audiences, although the majority of Netflix’s viewership comes from across the pond, which explains why some shows that are beloved in Blighty don’t appear as high up the list.

What are the most popular Netflix shows for first half of 2023?

The What We Watched report looks at viewing figures from the January to June 2023, on titles with 50,000 hours streamed or more - these titles account for around 99% of streaming on the platform.

The single most streamed title for a single season of a TV series was season one of The Night Agent, about an FBI agent who is pulled into a conspiracy at the heart of the White House. The show had 812.1 million hours watched in the six month period. It’s hard to believe, but this equates to 92,694 years of telly watching time from just one show.

The next most popular Netflix titles were Ginny & Georgia season two (665.1 million hours), The Glory season one (622.8 million) Wednesday season one (507.1 million) Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story (503 million), and You season four (440.6 million).

Licenced titles remained popular on the site, with The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, and Suits, which together made up 500 million hours of streaming in the first six months of the year. The Walking Dead is available on Netflix in the US, whereas it can be streamed on Disney+ in the UK. Meanwhile Friends, which is available to stream in the UK, but left the platform in the US in December 2019, racked up 448.5 million hours of streaming across all ten seasons. 

The most popular non-English title on the site was South Korean drama The Glory, but other popular shows included South Korean reality series Physical 100, Spanish drama The Snow Girl, and Israeli drama Fauda. Non-English language films and shows accounted for 30% of viewing for Netflix over the period. Additionally, the report found that English language titles were streamed with either dubs or subtitles 45% of the time.

What was the most watched film on Netflix for January-June 2023?

Films also perform well for Netflix, though because they are typically much shorter than TV shows, they tend to rank lower in terms of hours streamed. The biggest film hit for the first half of the year was Jennifer Lopez-starring action thriller The Mother, which audiences spent 249.9 million hours with.

Other popular movies were Luther: The Fallen Sun (209.7 million hours), Extraction 2 (201.8 million), and Jonah Hill, Eddie Murphy two-hander You People (181.8 million). The most popular foreign language film on the platform was AKA, starring former footballer Eric Cantona, which was viewed for 120 million hours.