The Quest To Find The Actual Best Show On Netflix

Inspired by a random headline I just saw about how you need to watch the “best” show on Netflix after finishing Stranger Things, I got to wondering, is there any, actual way to figure out what the best show on Netflix actually is?

The problem, of course, is subjectivity. What if the best show on Netflix is the world’s greatest horror series, but you just hate horror as a genre? Well, no amount of convincing is probably going to get you to watch or enjoy it regardless.

So, we have to go across a number of different metrics here. And that’s going to produce perhaps a few different shows for you to try out, since we are unlikely to find a singular conclusion (though I will give you my own personal opinion eventually).

The Most Watched Netflix Series

You may immediately be thinking of Squid Game here, because its 2.2+ billion hours of watch time for season 1 surpasses any other individual season on the service, but the true answer, as best as we can tell from the data, is almost certainly Stranger Things. Unlike Squid Game, Stranger Things has four seasons under its belt now, and season 4 alone is approaching 1.5 billion viewing hours in its first month by itself. Add in the three, also popular seasons before that and yes, Stranger Things is the most watched, and probably by proxy, most accessible, series on Netflix.

The Most Awarded Netflix Series

Okay, so you want prestige? Netflix has some options for that as well. If we’re talking the Netflix original series with the most awards, I think there’s only one real standout pick here. That would be The Crown, the decade-spanning series about the royal family and Queen Elizabeth which has an incredible 63 nominations and 21 wins at the Emmys across four seasons so far. Other shows you may think could be close, are not. Ozark, for instance, has 45 nominations but only 3 wins. Stranger Things has 51 nominations and 7 wins. The Crown takes…the crown.

The Most Critically Beloved Netflix Series

Here, we turn to Rotten Tomatoes, which has the 200 best Netflix originals of all time stacked together in a list. At the end of that list is its #1 pick, The Baby-Sitters Club, which ran for two seasons and has two perfect 100% scores for both. Naturally, this is a show Netflix decided to cancel after that. There are many 100% shows, but few with multiple seasons with this many critic reviews in. However, if we turn to Metacritic instead, which doesn’t use thumbs up/thumbs down, but actual number scores averaged, the highest rated individual season of any show is the last string of BoJack Horseman season 6 episodes, with a 91 average score.

The Most Audience Beloved Netflix Series

Screw critics, right? What do they know! So if instead we turn to fan opinions, we have some audience score data to go on. On Rotten Tomatoes, the highest audience score I can find is for Heartstopper at a 97%, the gay high school romance that debuted recently and was just picked up for two more seasons. Over on IMDB, the highest user-rated Netflix original there is Arcane, with 190,000 reviews giving it a 9/10 score, making it the only Netflix show inside the top 25 TV shows of all time on that site. It also has a 96% audience score and 100% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes.

For my money, if you were trying to make an overall argument for the best Netflix show, your top choices probably do hover around three central options, The Crown, Stranger Things and Arcane, albeit for different reasons, and all are wildly different series. And of course, there’s personal opinion here. My actual favorite Netflix series of all time? Probably a tie between The Haunting of Hill House and Dark. High on some of these other list metrics, but not topping them.

Anyway, you can’t really go wrong with anything I’ve mentioned here. Enjoy.

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