That The Asunta Case would work well on Netflix was a plausible hypothesis, taking into account that it is a true crime series and that The Body on Fire, a similar production, had performed well in the platform’s catalog. It has not disappointed. With 5.4 million views last week, Bambú Producciones’ drama (Cable Girls) is the most watched series in a non-English language on Netflix and the second in total, only behind My Stuffed Reindeer, which It is certified as a bombshell.
The data from The Asunta case is notable because only its first three days are taken into account: the platform analyzes the consumption of its content from Monday to Sunday and the Galician novelty landed in the catalog last Friday. In that time it managed to accumulate 29.4 million hours of viewing which, put in perspective, represents an improvement compared to the series with Úrsula Corberó released in September.
The murder of Asunta Basterra, which exposes the murder of a 12-year-old girl in September 2013 at the hands of her parents on the outskirts of Santiago de Compostela, has won in both possible metrics over the so-called crime of the Urban Police on Rosa Peral , who murdered her fiancé with the help of her lover Albert López. The Burning Body, during its first week, achieved 4.1 million views with 26.6 million hours watched among Netflix subscribers.
Now the interest is to see to what extent it is a triumph of expectation or if we are facing a possible international word of mouth. The Burning Body, for example, had a good run. In its first five weeks it obtained 18 million total views from 118 million hours watched, which did not exactly qualify as a phenomenon but as a success for a non-Anglo-Saxon production and without an exorbitant budget for a streaming service like Netflix.
The series that is becoming a phenomenon is My Stuffed Reindeer, Richard Gadd’s series where its creator expresses two real traumatic experiences: when he was harassed by a woman for four years and the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of a colleague .
In its first week it was placed in fifth position among English-language titles with 2.6 million views from 10.4 million hours watched among subscribers. In the second, in which word-of-mouth had begun, it had another 13.3 million views from 52.8 million hours watched, which allowed it to establish itself in first position. And now, in its third week, it has reached its best figure to date: 22 million views from 87.4 million hours watched.
If we analyze the Netflix data based on the viewing metric, My Stuffed Reindeer has surpassed recent hits such as The Gentlemen or Griselda, and also the biggest fiction bet so far in 2024, that The Three Body Problem created by Dan Weiss and David Benioff, the creators of Game of Thrones. Only Deception surpasses it, which in its first week accumulated 37.1 million views in what was considered a more than unforeseen success for a B-series mystery thriller.
Waiting to see to what extent the expectation can grow or be maintained, having become a critically acclaimed series that does not leave indifferent viewers who recommend and comment on it incessantly (and even search for and harass possible attackers of Gadd on social media), two conclusions can be drawn from this success.
The first is that when you have bold and original but accessible content, the Netflix audience responds. And the second is that Netflix’s UK fiction department deserves an increase and recognition from Ted Sarandos: between Deceptions, The Gentlemen and My Stuffed Reindeer, who carries the weight of the company in the field of series are being the British Isles in recent months.
