‘Arcane’ Ends 2021 Setting Unheralded Netflix Records

Netflix really only cares about one thing: eyeballs, and that’s why we perhaps haven’t heard them singing the praises of one show as much as they should. Yes, for a spell, Arcane was a top show in a number of countries, but it wasn’t planted there for weeks like some other series, and it did not take over the entire planet’s conversation like Squid Game.

And yet, as we end 2021, I’ve been looking back at Arcane’s performance in what we can measure, and the results are…still rather stunning. I thought its high scores may drop over time, as tends to happen, but that simply has not taken place.

Best I can tell, Arcane boasts all of the following across various online review sites:

• Arcane maintains a 100% critic average on Rotten Tomatoes, though only 22 critics did scored reviews for it, which seems insane. Other Netflix shows have gotten 100%s, of course, but infrequently.
• Arcane has 97% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, a record for any Netflix show I’ve come across. Pick the most prestigious, beloved Netflix series you can think of, and you’ll find that even ones like The Crown or The Witcher are still “just” at a 91% audience score.
• Arcane doesn’t even have a Metascore (again, insane), but it has a 9.4 user rating, the highest of any new show this year, and Netflix’s highest user score of any series, I can find, in any year.
• Arcane has a 9.3/10 score on IMDB with 99,000 ratings in. Again, the highest of any Netflix original series to date. It puts in in the top 5 scripted shows ever on that site, alongside Breaking Bad, Band of Brothers, Chernobyl and The Wire.

The only numbers we have from Netflix itself are 120 million global hours watched. That’s a lot, but miles away from a monster like Squid Game, currently at 2.1 billion hours watched globally.

Arcane is a weird case. As you can see from only 22 scored reviews and Metacritic not even assembling a score for it, it was largely ignored by most traditional TV critics. Netflix itself had relatively little to say about it in the face of other megahits. But audiences? Audiences raved, and cannot stop raving, putting up these user score records across every site that tracks them, both for Netflix, but propelling Arcane into a tier full of all-time greats as well.

Of course, we don’t have to worry. Arcane season 2 was confirmed the day season 1 ended, and it seems like Riot may end up doing other shows based in the world as well, and even pursue live-action projects as well. They’re just getting started, and the only question is whether they will be able to produce a miracle like this for another season or five.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.