Two things are true at once. Total viewing has never been higher, and the biggest hit has shrunk three halves running: 144.8M → 124M → 104M. TV hours rose 4.5% to 74 billion; film hours fell 3.1% to 23 billion.
The top ten series, H1 2026
- 1. His & Hers — 104M views (454M hours)
- 2. Bridgerton S4 — 100.2M (889M hours)
- 3. I Will Find You — 63.9M
- 4. Stranger Things 5 — 55.6M
- 5. Run Away — 50.3M
- 6. Teach You a Lesson — 48.2M
- 7. One Piece S2 — 47.3M
- 8. Man on Fire — 40.4M
- 9. Ms. Rachel S1 — 37.3M
- 10. The Night Agent S3 — 36.1M
Only two series cleared 100M. Six films did — War Machine 146.9M, The Rip 136.1M, Swapped 130.8M, KPop Demon Hunters 130.4M, Apex 129M.
What the top five actually are
His & Hers is a six-episode crime thriller from Alice Feeney's novel, out 8 January, with Jon Bernthal, Tessa Thompson and Pablo Schreiber. A limited series — no season two. Run Away and I Will Find You are both Harlan Coben adaptations, both limited, eight episodes each.
Three of the top five are self-contained book-adapted thrillers. Netflix's biggest TV format of the half was not a franchise.
Why Stranger Things 5 is only fourth
Because the calendar cut it in half. It opened to 59.6M views — the biggest English-language TV debut in Netflix history — but dropped across 26 November to 31 December 2025. Roughly 94M views booked to H2 2025 and only 55.6M to H1 2026. Its true 91-day total, 133.8M, appears on neither list.
The same thing is happening to I Will Find You in reverse: it premiered 18 June, so the report caught under two weeks. Its 91-day figure is 115.4M — the seventh-biggest English-language series Netflix has ever had, and it would have topped this chart outright.
Worth knowing how the metric works: a view is hours watched divided by total runtime. That is why six films beat all but two series despite TV accounting for 74 of the 97 billion hours.
Context, for scale
All-time: Squid Game S1 remains the biggest series at 265.2M views in 91 days; KPop Demon Hunters is the biggest film ever at 325.1M and the most-watched title Netflix has reported, at 482M across 2025. Non-English is steady at "more than a third" of all viewing, with Korea, Japan and Spain leading.
Ted Sarandos says titles are "performing well within our bands of expectation." Greg Peters says "all hours are not created equal." The stock fell over 8% after the call.
Can anything left in 2026 beat it
On the TV side, probably not. The autumn slate is Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story (17 September), A Different World (24 September), Unabomber with Russell Crowe (25 September), East of Eden with Florence Pugh (1 October), Lupin Part 4 (23 October). The one plausible challenger to War Machine on the film side is The Adventures of Cliff Booth — Fincher directing, Tarantino writing, Brad Pitt starring — but it lands 23 December, so most of its viewing falls into next year.
One footnote: from Q1 2027 Netflix moves from six-month reports to annual ones. This is the second-to-last half-year snapshot it will publish. The weekly Top 10 stays at top10.netflix.com.
Related: Tires got a season 4 in two weeks. Will Ferrell opened bigger and got nothing.