Popular home to thousands of movies and TV shows that deserve your attention this holiday season, Netflix also offers plenty of original content that has been released over the past few years. The company invested millions of dollars in its movies, TV shows, documentaries and shows for kids, and some of them have been must-see hits.
Even so, those people who are new to Netflix are probably wondering which of the company’s shows are the best to binge right now. Netflix doesn’t disclose official viewing numbers for any of them – it doesn’t even tell studios that make the shows how many people have watched them – so we’ll give you some guidance.
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Narcos, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Orange Is the New Black, Jessica Jones and Master of None are the best original series you can watch this year on Netflix, many of them having been released in the past few months alone.
The list is based on Business Insider’s research into the popularity of Netflix’s original productions. The news site ignored documentaries, TV shows resurrected from other networks, shows for kids, stand-up specials and movies, and then looked at review aggregator Metacritic for critic and audience scores for each title.
Interestingly, the two most recent shows took the top spots — Jessica Jones and Master of None. Of the top five, only Orange Is the New Black is an “old” Netflix creation; the third season of the popular prison drama premiered earlier this year.
Notably absent from the top five are Marco Polo (14th), Bloodline (9th), Daredevil (8th) and House of Cards (6th) – in all, there are 16 original TV series you can find on Netflix at this time.
Here are the scores for these best five original TV Netflix shows, as ranked by Business Insider.
- No.5: Narcos – average critic score 77/100 and audience score 9.0/10
- No.4: The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt – average critic score 78/100 and audience score 8.0/10
- No.3: Orange Is the New Black – average critic score 79/100 and audience score 8.5/10
- No.2: Jessica Jones – average critic score 81/100 and audience score 7.8/10
- No.1: Master of None – average critic score 91/100 and audience score 7.7/10
