Bad Thoughts. Tom Segura in season 1 of Bad Thoughts. Cr. Shaun Nix/Netflix © 2025
Welcome along to another big breakdown of the Netflix top 10s! It’s been a rough week for the new Netflix US series, with all three premieres vastly underperforming against expectations. Things are looking much rosier on the international slate, particularly on the documentary slate. Here are all the biggest stories from the Netflix top 10s.
Note: In this report of Netflix’s hours viewed from May 12th, 2025 to May 18th, 2025, we’ll use “Complete Viewings Equivalent,” or CVE, expressed in millions. That means we divide the hours viewed announced by Netflix by the runtime of films or series. It allows for better comparisons between films and series, but it’s not an audience metric. It is the minimum number of viewings if they were all complete from the first second to the last of the film or season.
1. Love, Death & Robots on the verge of critical failure.
The animated anthology series Love, Death & Robots returned last week for its fourth season. Despite the presence of David Fincher among the directors of the new episodes, this season’s launch was significantly weaker than that of Season 3, with a drop of around 50%. That’s a lot.
2. The week of “serialized anthology docs”
Last week, Netflix released new installments in three of its “doc collections,” starting with a new episode in the Untold documentary series, which focuses on stories related to sports. The Liver King has an eye-catching title, which helped it enter the Top 10 this week, but with only 5M CVEs, it’s performing at an average level.
There was also American Manhunt: Osama Bin Laden, which is now the third documentary in the American Manhunt series. Its launch was excellent, with 12.6M CVEs in its first five days—well ahead of the episodes focused on the Boston bombing and O.J. Simpson. Whatever reason for the delay from its initial launch earlier this year paid off.
And finally, a new “A British Horror Story” dropped, focused on Fred & Rose West, who now join Jimmy Savile in this collection (not exactly a series one would want to be part of). Here, too, the latest installment had a stronger launch, with 8.3M CVEs in its first five days.
3. Two additional flops for Netflix US on the series side.
I’m not sure Netflix had high hopes for Tom Segura’s Bad Thoughts, but in its first 6 days, it performed well below the launches of the European series The Breakthrough and The Glass Dome this year. It’s a mini-series, so there’s no real stakes here, but it’s definitely not where the next I Think You Should Leave will come from.
One series that likely won’t be getting another season is Bet, adapted from a Japanese manga and created by the showrunner of Warrior Nun. With just 2.4M CVEs in its first four days, it’s one of the weakest launches for a new U.S. Netflix series since June 2021. Unless it were part of an initial two-season order, I’d bet (sorry) that Bet will be cancelled.
4. Secrets We Keep is no longer secret
I took a small gamble on it last week, and the Danish mini-series Secrets We Keep didn’t prove me wrong, pulling off the second-best launch for a European mini-series released on a Thursday, behind La Palma but ahead of Dear Child, both of which ended up in the all-time Top 10. It’s far too early to predict a similar trajectory, but it’s already an excellent start. Well done, Netflix Denmark.
5. Rotten Legacy might not have any legacy.
It’ll be a tougher road for the Spanish series Rotten Legacy, which had a decidedly mediocre start with 2.2M CVEs over its first three days, putting it near the bottom of the rankings for new Spanish series launches. Its fate now depends on how it performs in the coming days, but things aren’t looking promising.
6. Franklin is moving fast.
From Lebanon, the series Franklin (no relation to the turtle) has already pulled off the impressive feat of breaking into the Top 10 in its release week, with 2M EVCs over its first four days. Based on comparisons in my dataset, it looks likely to be renewed.
That’s all for this week, feel free to let us know what you think in the comments below.
