This week’s global Top 10 ranking from Netflix, revealing the streamer’s biggest TV shows around the world, includes one newcomer to the #1 spot: It’s Painkiller, a just-released drama about the opioid crisis whose executive producer Eric Newman previously worked on Netflix’s Narcos. Other than that debut at #1 on the worldwide Top 10 English TV shows chart, though, this week’s list is really more of the same.
Generally, these most-watched shows on the list seem to reflect that Netflix’s subscribers are in the mood for old favorites like The Lincoln Lawyer rather than new hits at the moment. Indeed, a ton of new shows and movies are constantly hitting the platform week in and week out, but just take a look at the ranking below, and you can’t help but notice — more than half of it is dominated by new seasons of existing Netflix franchises.
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Netflix Top 10 (August 7-August 13)
Here’s a closer look at the current winners. Starting with Painkiller, these are the top 10 (English-language) Netflix series and shows in the world right now:
- Painkiller — 7.2 million views
- The Lincoln Lawyer: Season 2 — 5.2 million views
- Gabby’s Dollhouse: Season 8 — 4.1 million views
- Heartstopper: Season 2 — 4 million views
- Fatal Seduction: Season 1 — 2.8 million views
- The Witcher: Season 3 — 2.8 million views
- Om Nom Stories: Season 1 — 2.4 million views
- The Lincoln Lawyer: Season 1 — 2.2 million views
- Sweet Magnolias: Season 3 — 1.9 million views
- Fisk: Season 1 — 1.8 million views
I stressed “English language” above, by the way, because while you can see that The Lincoln Lawyer is in the top spot on the list above, it’s not actually the #1 Netflix show on the basis of raw hours viewed. For that, you have to also take into account Netflix’s Top 10 non-English TV shows, which reveals that on the basis of raw hours viewed, a K-drama called King the Land is outperforming everything you see on the Top 10 list above (with 60.6 million raw hours viewed this week, compared to 55 million for The Lincoln Lawyer).
Honestly, though, it’s probably not worth quibbling about, given that Netflix has stopped using raw hours viewed to rank its shows anymore. Instead, Netflix now divides that raw number by the TV season’s total runtime to get the new “total views” figure in order to determine chart placement. If that sounds like a strange way to rank shows to you, though, join the club.
#1: Painkiller
Now, let’s take a closer look at the top two series dominating the streaming platform this week — both Painkiller as well as The Lincoln Lawyer Season 2, which is still riding high after six weeks on the Top 10 chart.
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Regarding the former: As we explained in our preview of this 6-episode drama, the ambition here is basically to reveal how the company behind the drug OxyContin became one of the biggest villains of Big Pharma. Matthew Broderick portrays that company’s billionaire chairman Richard Sackler, and he will absolutely make your skin crawl here — as will the company’s Barbie doll drug reps, with their knack for transforming supposedly professional physicians into often lecherous conduits for getting Oxy into the hands of as many users as possible.
Broderick’s Sackler has a particularly chilling moment at one point in the series, when he explains how the entirety of human behavior is comprised of just two motivations: As he explains it, the entirety of the human experience consists of either running from pain or running toward pleasure. “If we place ourselves right there between pain and pleasure,” Sackler confidently declares in Painkiller, “we will never have to worry about money again.”
Broderick has a mostly expressionless face throughout the show, which only underscores the degree of evil his Sackler conveys throughout Painkiller, the narrative for which is driven by the work of a relentless fictional lawyer played by Uzo Aduba.
The source material that underpins this Top 10 series comes from Patrick Radden Keefe’s New Yorker piece “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain,” as well as Barry Meier’s book “Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic.” And if you needed even more of an incentive to watch, the team behind Painkiller includes veterans of NBC’s Friday Night Lights as well as, ironically, Netflix’s Narcos — which is to say, they know how to make gripping television.
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Speaking of the latter: There’s a powerful moment even before the show starts, where a woman who we quickly learn was a mother speaks directly to the camera, explaining that the show you’re about to see is a work of fiction but was, in fact, based on real people and events. And then she holds up a picture of her son, who died as a result of OxyContin. It’s a moment that takes your breath away — even before the show gets going to tell you how it happened.
#2: The Lincoln Lawyer: Season 2
Moving on to the #2 Netflix show in the world this week — as we noted in a recent post about the continued popularity on Netflix of Suits, legal dramas like that one, as well as The Lincoln Lawyer, are having something of a moment. The latter, however, is arguably the best of the genre that’s currently available to stream.
Moreover, The Lincoln Lawyer is one of a slew of top-notch book adaptations that Netflix offers its subscribers — including everything from the award-winning movie All Quiet on the Western Front, based on the epic World War I novel, to the Bridgerton series, the To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before movie franchise, and the upcoming 3 Body Problem from the Game of Thrones showrunners, to name just a few.
As for the legal drama that’s the #2 English-language show in the world on Netflix this week, it’s based on the Michael Connelly book series of the same name and stars Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as Mickey Haller. He’s the attorney who runs his law practice out of the backseat of his titular Lincoln, and the second season of the hit Netflix show is based on the fourth book in Connelly’s series — The Fifth Witness.
Here’s how Netflix describes the character: “Born in Los Angeles and raised partially in Mexico by his mother, Mickey is just returning to work after a hiatus. He became dependent on prescription pain pills following an accident, but has now kicked the habit. He has two ex-wives (with whom he’s still very friendly) and relies on a client-turned-driver to chauffeur him around his hometown.
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“Because he wins a major case at the end of Season 1, Mickey is inarguably the “hottest defense lawyer in LA” when we see him again in Season 2.”
The show, Season 2 of which has an 89% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, is currently a Top 10 Netflix series in 72 countries.
Other Netflix shows you might want to consider if you enjoy legal dramas like The Lincoln Lawyer include:
Partner Track: Based on Helen Wan’s 2013 novel of the same name, the series Partner Track is built around the character of Ingrid Yun, a first-generation Korean-American navigating romance, drama, and the high stakes of working at a prestigious law firm. As the first lawyer in her family, Netflix goes on to explain that in Partner Track Yun experiences “the trials and tribulations” of excelling at an old-school law firm.
Extraordinary Attorney Woo: One of the biggest Korean-language hits of 2022, here’s how Netflix describes this delightful series about an attorney named Woo Young-woo: “As someone with autism spectrum disorder, she faces various prejudices but wins over her colleagues at a top law firm by spotting details and legal loopholes that nobody else can see. As the show’s screenwriter Moon Ji-won puts it: ‘Once she takes on a case, it takes a turn that viewers could not have seen before anywhere else.’”