Force Your Family To Watch Netflix’s #1 Show This Thanksgiving, ‘Arcane’

As you gather together for Thanksgiving this year, I suppose you can watch football, or you can watch something even better, Netflix’s new smash hit, Arcane.

Tis the season to spread the gospel of Arcane to your friends and family, and if you need actual, hard data to back up your suggestion, here you go:

• Arcane is the #1 show on Netflix this past week now that all nine episodes are out, with 38 million viewing hours, a full 8 million more than second place, Tiger King 2.
• Arcane has a perfect 100% score from critics, but most impressively, a 98% score from fans and a 9.4 on IMDB, putting in the same tier as Breaking Bad, Chernobyl and Band of Brothers on that site.

Yes, it’s an animated series, which will turn some people off from the jump. It’s also based on a video game, League of Legends, but feel free not to actually tell anyone that, as it could bias them against it, and the show does a perfect job of worldbuilding and developing its characters without you needing to know literally anything about the game at all. It’s a fantastical world of technology and magic, complete with a beautiful, sad story about family at its core.

I will say Arcane is probably not for little kids, given some solidly scary imagery and violence, and a good amount of cursing. But I would recommend it for most audiences, and it’s a great series to check out with family this holiday.

Can you make it through all the episodes on Thanksgiving? Well, that might be pushing it. Each episode is 40 minutes long and there are nine of them, so it would be an all day affair with about 6 hours of show to watch total. But it’s doable! And it could be finished up over the course of the holiday weekend if you don’t get to it all in one sitting.

I suppose you could play it safe and do The Princess Switch 3 or Red Notice, but take a chance! Arcane really is that good, and you may make believers out of family members that wouldn’t have otherwise checked it out. And if you’re left wanting more (which you will be), don’t worry, season 2 has already been greenlit, and it sounds like more shows set in the universe with the same gorgeous animation style are being planned as well.

It’s up to you, but I think you could do a lot worse than preaching the gospel of Arcane to your family. It’s a fantastic series with unforgettable animation and instantly iconic characters (who of course have been icons in League for years, but whatever). If you manage to convince your family to give it a shot, let me know how it goes, I’m curious.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and its audiobook, and The Earthborn Trilogy, also on audiobook.