Netflix Pulled Data And Pinpointed The Exact Episodes That Got Everyone Hooked On TV’s Most Popular Shows

Based on the results of a recent Netflix study there’s not a single hit TV show that’s hooked viewers on the first episode. Netflix pulled data on TV’s most popular shows, and from there they looked at which episode in the series was responsible for hooking in viewers. Specifically they took a look at what number of episode where once viewers watched it 70% of them went on to watch the entire series.

With some of these series it took a pretty damn long time for people to get hooked. I’d claim that in the case of a show like Arrow where it took fans 8 episodes before they got hooked that the show itself might just not be good. But in the case of How I Met Your Mother, a show that ran for 9 seasons and 208 episodes, I’d assume it was just harder to get people to commit to such a long series.

“Arrow” – Episode 8
“Bates Motel” – Episode 2
“Better Call Saul” – Episode 4
“Bloodline” – Episode 4
“BoJack Horseman” – Episode 5
“Breaking Bad” – Episode 2
“Daredevil” – Episode 5
“Dexter” – Episode 3
“Gossip Girl” – Episode 3
“Grace & Frankie” – Episode 4
“How I Met Your Mother” – Episode 8
“House of Cards” – Episode 3
“Mad Men” – Episode 6
“Marco Polo” – Episode 3
“Orange Is the New Black” – Episode 3
“Once Upon A Time” – Episode 6
“Pretty Little Liars” – Episode 4
“Scandal” – Episode 2
“Sense8″ – Episode 3
“Sons of Anarchy”* – Episode 2
“Suits” – Episode 2
“The Blacklist” – Episode 6
“The Killing” – Episode 2
“The Walking Dead” – Episode 2
“Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” – Episode 4

I’m actually blown away that it took through episode 5 of Marvel’s Daredevil to get people hooked, it’s easily in the top 2 Netflix originals ever created and I was hooked from the pilot. If you’re not watching Daredevil yet there’s something wrong with you.

TheVerge was first to report on this data from Netflix:

Netflix’s data comes from viewing habits on its own service across 16 markets, including the US, UK, and Australia, although not all shows were available in all areas. The episode that Netflix names as the “hooked” episode is the global average, but it found some local variations. “The Dutch, for instance, tend to fall in love with series the fastest, getting hooked one episode ahead of most countries irrespective of the show,” Netflix writes. On the other hand, “members in Australia and New Zealand [got] hooked one to two episodes later than the rest of the world on almost every show.”

For more on this data you can click on over to Variety!