It took far longer than I figured it would, but the poorly-rated, highly-watched Netflix series All the Light We Cannot See has finally lost its #1 spot after a lengthy stay.
The new show that has debuted at #1 is, you guessed it, another True Crime documentary, this one called Escaping the Twin Flames about a “spiritual business” that ended up having “disturbing practices.” Perhaps not as famous as NXIVM, the sex cult, but at least adjacent, it seems. This will likely not stay at #1 for too long, given that it’s three episodes, but I might have said the same thing about All the Light You Cannot See, which was just a four episode miniseries, essentially a long, unedited movie.
All the Light We Cannot See really did review quite poorly, just a 24% on Rotten Tomatoes from 50 critics, though its audience score was much higher at a 68%, indicating why it may have stayed on top for a long while. It’s of course based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Anthony Doerr which was released in 2014, and no doubt was always destined for an adaptation like this. But it seems to have failed to match the source material.
The rest of the list? More reality! Though now that the Writers and Actors strikes are both over, perhaps that will change down the road once production resumes on a whole lot of scripted series again. I do think Selling Sunset might be fading a bit, given that season 7 did not hit number one and likely will not. But the show is so cheap to make it doesn’t matter, and it will exist forever, Netflix’s “Real Housewives” equivalent.
After that, it’s a mix of crime shows and comedy specials and reality series. Literally every other show on the list save one falls into one of those categories, indicating just how heavily Netflix is leaning on unscripted content these days. The exception is Blue Eye Samurai, a new anime series that has excellent scores and appears to be worth watching. I’m certainly going to be checking it out.
Once more, there is literally not a show on this list (besides perhaps Blue Eye) that needs to perform well to get more seasons. All the Light We Cannot See is a miniseries, and everything else is unscripted. It’s been a while since viewers had to fret about anything getting renewed, but I wonder if there are a lot of scripted series coming out that simply never hit the list at all, which wouldn’t be good.
Anyway, we’ll see what comes next, as we do have some higher profile Netflix projects like The Crown coming back soon.
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