‘The Night Agent’ Somehow Lands Netflix’s Third Biggest Premiere Week Ever

While I’ve seen The Night Agent hovering at Netflix’s #1 spot on its global top 10 lists since release, those lists never provide actual context or scale. But now that Netflix is releasing some numbers, The Night Agent has been revealed to be…one of their biggest premieres ever? Really?

Yes, it’s true. The Night Agent had 168.17 million viewing hours in just its first four days of release, according to Netflix tracking. That’s behind just two other series, both from last year, first place gigahit Wednesday, which had 341.23 million hours, and Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story at 196.2 million.

What that means is that season 2 of The Night Agent is 100% guaranteed, as Wednesday obviously got one and Dahmer is even doing more serial killers now just to keep the “Monster” branding going for at least two more seasons.

The extent of knowledge I currently have about The Night Agent is that my wife said it’s “pretty good.” Its reviews are…okay. 69% from just 16 critics, 82% from just 250 audience ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. And yet somehow, a zillion people are watching it globally, it seems. I’m definitely going to need to watch it now, that much is clear.

The official description sounds like a decently standard Jack Ryan-type situation:

“Low-level FBI agent, Peter Sutherland, works in the basement of the White House manning a phone that never rings—until the night it does—propelling him into a conspiracy that leads all the way to the Oval Office.”

The show is supposed to be reminiscent of The Recruit, another recent spy thriller that got picked up for a second season by Netflix, though The Night Agent has far more viewing hours. It’s unclear just how long its legs will be and if these figures will put it in Netflix’s all-timers list of its biggest shows in 28 days of viewing. Probably yes, it seems.

Elsewhere in Netflix’s viewing figures, Korean hit The Glory has now amassed 413.05 million hours in its first month of release, topping non-English charts, and placing at sixth in Netflix’s all-time list of foreign language productions, behind the likes of Money Heist and Squid Game.

There is some not great news here for Shadow and Bone, which crashed to 55.03 million viewing hours when it’s fighting for both a season 3 and a Six of Crows spin-off, which seems very up in the air with those numbers and with how expensive that production likely is. But we’ll see.

The Night Agent though? It’s Netflix’s biggest show of 2023 so far, kind of out of nowhere. We’ll see just how high it can go as the weeks press on.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.