One of the patterns you often see with Netflix’s new releases that rocket up the streamer’s Top 10 charts immediately post-release is an inevitable deceleration of interest as time goes by. There’s an immediate explosion of interest, in other words, that slowly wanes from one week to the next. We saw that with Netflix’s recently canceled (but fan-favorite) series First Kill. Intriguingly, however, the exact opposite has proven to be the case with the newly released fantasy adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s comic series The Sandman.
The 10-episode Sandman series hit Netflix on Friday, August 5. And by the time Netflix’s next weekly Top 10 global TV shows chart (covering August 1-7) rolled around, The Sandman was already #1. It racked up almost 70 million hours of global viewing time after having been live on the streamer for just three days.
On Tuesday, August 16, Netflix released its newest batch of global Top 10 movie and TV show charts. And what the new top English-language TV show ranking reveals, among other things, is The Sandman now having widened its lead over the competition. It’s still the #1 Netflix show in the world right now. For this latest 7-day chart period, The Sandman amassed 127.5 million hours of viewing time globally. The #2 show this week? Season 3 of Never Have I Ever, which pulled in less than half that amount (a little over 55 million hours).
From Netflix’s synopsis of The Sandman: “A rich blend of modern myth and dark fantasy in which contemporary fiction, historical drama, and legend are seamlessly interwoven, The Sandman follows the people and places affected by Morpheus, the Dream King, as he mends the cosmic — and human — mistakes he’s made during his vast existence.”
Given how well it’s been received so far, it certainly seems that Gaiman made the smart choice in forgoing all of the other Sandman adaptations that had been proposed over the years, finally participating in this one from Netflix. And in terms of how The Sandman has actually been received thus far, outside of pulling in an impressive amount of hours viewed? The current Rotten Tomatoes data offers some perspective.
The show has garnered a solid 87% aggregate critics score at the moment on the review aggregation site. That’s based on 91 reviews, like this one from our sister publication The Wrap: “The Sandman is a beautifully rendered and riveting horror thriller series with the potential to be a huge hit.”
As far as where audiences stand, the current Rotten Tomatoes score there stands at 79%, based on 1,749 user ratings so far. On a related note, here’s also an interesting data point courtesy of IMDb:
Following the series premiere on August 5 on Netflix, The Sandman jumped 13 spots to the #2 most popular TV show in the world with IMDb users. That’s according to IMDbPro’s Most Popular TV rankings, which rank titles weekly based on the page views of the more than 200 million monthly visitors to IMDb.
