Ugly Betty is number one where? The biggest surprises from Netflix’s global top 10 lists
Ugly Betty will never die. Netflix shared that bombshell with the world this week as it launched a website listing the weekly top 10 most popular TV shows and movies on its service around the world, divided into English and non-English categories. The countdown makes for fascinating and disturbing reading – a reminder that the world is an increasingly small and homogenous place, but that there’s no accounting for local tastes.
And so, in Guatemala and Venezuela, Yo Soy Betty, the original Latin dramedy later remade as Ugly Betty, continues to pull in huge audiences (between November 8-14 it racked up 7,650,000 hours) with five weeks in the top 10. It gets stranger than that – in another part of the planet that same week, subscribers were lapping up laugh-free Big Bang Theory spin-off Young Sheldon – seasons one, two and three.
What country could that be? Yes, it’s the UK. Young Sheldon season one is in top spot, followed by Young Sheldon season two (very much the Godfather Part II of sitcoms about teenage prodigies). In eighth place, meanwhile, is Young Sheldon season three. Forget Greta Thunberg or Billie Eilish. If there’s a teenager who has 21st century Britain in the palm of their hands, it’s 13-year-old Sheldon Cooper. Perhaps the pandemic changed us in ways we’ve only started to fathom.
We shall leave it to psychotherapists to explain the appeal of Young Sheldon to the great British public. But it is worth noting this is very much an anomaly. You won’t find the citizens of Réunion Island getting their laughing gear in a twist over the Big Bang Theory expanded universe. Instead, they’re chugging down season four of the remake of Eighties soap opera Dynasty, along with the inevitable Squid Game (number seven in the UK).
Squid Game also rules unchallenged in Bangladesh. It is followed by the third season of Narcos: Mexico and Call My Agent Bollywood, a Netflix-backed Indian remake of the French showbiz satire (a UK re-do staring Jim Broadbent, Lydia Leonard and Jack Davenport recently finished shooting).
The generic quality of many of the top 10s is striking. Arcane, a steampunk animation based on the League of Legends video game, hasn’t caught on in the UK. Yet the series is drawing stellar numbers for Netflix internationally. It’s at number three in Venezuela, behind Ugly Betty and Pablo Escobar, El Patrón Del Maand, and at number one in South Korea, land of Squid Game, and at number four in both Spain and Sweden. Netflix has clearly learned to speak the global patois of gaming nerds.
Still, if you poke around you’ll find not everything travels. Just as UK subscribers are hypnotised by Young Sheldon and his iconic dickie-bow so viewers in Nigeria are mesmerised by The Smart Money Woman. The Nigerian series, based on the 2016 novel by Arese Ugwu, has proved a sensation across Netflix in Africa since debuting in September. It focuses on “the spending culture of women and how it ultimately affects their finances on the long run”.
And then there are the Continent-spanning smashes that have entirely failed to make an impression in this part of the world. Locke and Key, Netflix’s glossy adaption of the Joe Hill graphic novels, is riding high in Mauritius, Réunion, Turkey and Trinidad and Tobago while failing to make a dent here. And across Asia, South Korean relationship drama Home Town Cha-Cha-Cha is thrilling subscribers.
Home Town Cha-Cha-Cha, which according to a plot synopsis sounds like Korea’s answer to Normal People, is number number two in Malaysia and the Philippines, number three in Singapore, number six in Japan and number nine in India. So it’s both a phenomenon and thoroughly obscure in the English-speaking world.
The same is true of the King’s Affection, another Korean hit, set 500 years ago and full of courtly intrigue and exciting swordplay. It’s a staple in Netflix top 10s globally while not getting a look-in across the UK and America.
The launch of a Global Top 10 site represents a significant pivot by Netflix. The company had been criticised for its “two minute viewing metric” by which it counted a show as “fully watched” if a subscriber had sat through a mere two minutes –i.e. barely long enough to get past the opening credits.
The new strategy is to list the total number of hours viewed and to upload the data every Tuesday, divided between television and movies and with a breakdown for the 190 countries in which Netflix operates.
Globally, the heavyweights on the list are Narcos: Mexico: Season 3 which has notched up a cumulative 50 million hours viewed, Arcane season one (34 million hours) and You season three (33 million). Neither the original Spanish-language Ugly Betty nor Young Sheldon get a look in. Suggesting that, if technology has helped bring the world together, in terms of our TV habits, we’re all still speaking different languages.