‘Virgin River’ Dethroned In Netflix’s Top 10 List By A New Show

Netflix sleeper hit Virgin River has had quite a long ride planted on top of Netflix’s top 10 list, but that time has come to an end. As of today, the new show hovering in second place, Keep Breathing, has now overtaken it for the #1 spot.

Virgin River fans need not fear, however. The show has been granted a rare Netflix pass for easy renewal, and season 5 was not only picked up a long time ago, it’s already starting to film as of this week, so fans won’t have to wait all that long to see the story continue. Virgin River is pretty unlike most other Netflix fare, and something that feels like it might have been more at home on Lifetime or The CW, but it has managed to become a high performer for the service. While it’s not winning any awards or shifting any pop cultural landscapes, it’s the kind of middle range hit that builds a backbone of good, casual content on Netflix as it continues to lose third party offerings.

Keep Breathing is a…somewhat different story.

As I wrote the other day, this is a pretty strange project, a limited, six episode series with just 30-40 minute episodes, bringing the total runtime to just over three and a half hours. It’s reviewing quite badly among both fans and critics. It has a 38% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics and a 46% from audiences, so it’s not really clear who is watching this, liking it, and recommending it.

Usually when we see this happen, with both low critic and audience scores, the series does not last long in the top spot, given that you need positive word of mouth, especially for a new series, to sustain it there. We saw this happen very recently with Resident Evil season 1, which had 52% critic scores and a almost record-low 26% audience score. Curiosity propelled it to the #1 slot for a few days, but it was soon re-unseated by Stranger Things, and has dropped sharply down the list ever since. Netflix has not greenlit a second season yet.

In this case, Keep Breathing, as a limited series, wasn’t supposed to get a second season in the first place, so that’s kind of moot. My guess is that this series was probably not even predicted to perform as well as it has already, although I’d argue if a lot of people are viewing your bad show, that’s not exactly help change your reputation as a streaming service with too much garbage cluttering it up, which is a problem Netflix has faced for a while now.

We’ll see where things go from here on the list, but I would not expect Keep Breathing to last there more than a couple of days, and Virgin River may even shoot back up again.

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