‘Gilmore Girls’ wins the ‘binge race’
Familiar series are favorites for viewers watching right away
How quickly do you consume full seasons of Netflix series?
If you watch within 24 hours of their (typical) Friday release, you’re one of 8.4 million subscribers the streaming giant has dubbed “binge-racers,” so desperate to be in the know — and ahead of the game on social media — that you’ll spend as much as 13 of those hours at a screen. Most do it only once, but one hardy U.S. subscriber has binge-raced through 36 series this year alone.
The notoriously secretive Netflix is revealing a bit of insight on the preferences and makeup of those superfans: In both the U.S. and globally, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life and Fuller House — re-
vivals of popular series — were the two most frequently binge-raced.
But the list diverges from there to a range of genres: Ashton Kutcher sitcom The Ranch, Marvel’s The Defenders and manga series The Seven Deadly Sins were next on the list. And geographically, Canada has the highest percapita incidence of binge-racing,
measured since 2013, when Netflix began its original-programming push in earnest with House of Cards (which ranks only 16th) and Orange Is the New Black (ninth).
Canada’s binge-racing dominance is followed by the U.S. and three Scandinavian countries: Denmark, Finland and Norway.
Among states, West Virginia is tops in per capita racing, followed by Michigan, Maryland, Delaware, Indiana and Ohio. (Florida, California and Colorado are far down the list, and Alaska and Hawaii are last.) Gilmore was tops in all states except West Virginia, where Fuller House prevailed, and in Montana, South Dakota and Wyoming, where The Ranch was binged fastest.
Netflix says the ranking has no direct correlation with overall popularity, a statistic it still closely guards. But it “reveals certain titles where that level of fervor and fandom exists,” says Brian Wright, a VP of original series. “You can still have an absolutely beloved show that is binged,” just not on the first day.
Wright says logic would dictate the behavior would be most prevalent for shows you can’t turn away from: “I would have guessed it would comprise cliffhanger dramas,” he says.
Instead, the most voraciously viewed series tend to be among the most eagerly anticipated. Familiar titles top the list, along with shorter comedies that require less time to plow through: Gilmore and Fuller are roughly six hours, less than half the length of many dramas.