Dominating Netflix‘s trending chart of the hottest TV shows this week is a new true-crime docuseries, one of the most reliably successful formats on the streaming giant — this one, revisiting one of the most infamous cold cases in history.
The series, Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey, is a three-part investigative project from Emmy-winning and Academy Award nominated director Joe Berlinger. Its focus: The disappearance and subsequent murder of John and Patsy Ramsey’s youngest child in December of 1996. It’s a much darker and unsettling new series compared to the streamer’s top draw last week, Ted Danson’s new comedy about aging. We’ll take a closer look at the new series below, along with the rest of what’s hot on Netflix this week.
Netflix Top 10 shows (Nov. 25-Dec. 1)
Here’s a look at this week’s complete list of the Top 10 English-language shows on Netflix.
- Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey (Season 1) — 13.4 million views
- The Madness — 9.3 million views
- A Man on the Inside (Season 1) — 7 million views
- Arcane (Season 2) — 4.2 million views
- Is It Cake? Holiday (Season 1) — 3.5 million views
- Cobra Kai (Season 6) — 2.6 million views
- Anthony Jeselnik: Bones and All — 2.4 million views
- The Creature Cases (Chapter 4) — 2.3 million views
- Arcane (Season 1) — 2.2 million views
- Outer Banks (Season 4) — 1.6 million views
To learn more about some of this week’s other most-watched series, you can go deeper by checking out our previous coverage of several of the Netflix originals on this list — including the new season of the YA drama Outer Banks as well as Danson’s heartwarming new comedy A Man on the Inside. For now, though, let’s focus on the biggest Netflix TV release in the world at the moment.
Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey — #1 on Netflix
From Netflix’s synopsis of the new Cold Case series, which is currently a Top 10 Netflix show in 78 countries: “On December 26, 1996, John and Patsy Ramsey woke up the morning after a loving family Christmas to discover their youngest child, six-year-old JonBenét, was missing, a chilling ransom note left downstairs.
“Later that day, John Ramsey discovered his daughter’s body in the basement, revealing the shocking truth that JonBenét had not been kidnapped, but was instead sexually assaulted and brutally murdered in their own home.”
Homicide investigations, strange as it might sound, weren’t something that police in the Ramsey’s home town of Boulder, Colorado, had much practical experience dealing with. Suspicion quickly fell on the family as most likely responsible for the death, which then turned the case into a disgusting media frenzy fed by one-sided reporting. And, no surprise, it wasn’t long before the case became a national obsession.
Berlinger’s Netflix docuseries is as much a probe of law enforcement and the media’s handling of the case as it is the facts of the murder itself. Because, 28 years after the fact, the obsession and finger-pointing over who killed this precious girl hasn’t gone away, the murder remaining tragically unsolved.
