The 25 Most Watched Netflix Series in the Second Half of 2025, According to Netflix

One of the most highly guarded secrets in the streaming industry is what exactly we're watching and how much of it we're streaming. Tech companies aren't keen on making these numbers public because they want to control the narrative of their success to control stock prices as best they can — this is the world we live in — but twice a year, Netflix gives us a little peek into stats and figures via the What We Watched: A Netflix Engagement Report, which gives us a snapshot of which shows were most popular on the platform. 

The most recent edition covers the time period from July 1 to Dec. 31, 2025, and it's no surprise which shows dominated the charts, but looking at the Top 25 revealed some big surprises (though not as many surprises as six months and a year ago). 

The report lists thousands of seasons of TV series by two metrics: total hours watched and total views, which is defined by Netflix as total hours watched divided by a show's runtime. For our gallery of the most watched shows of the second half of 2025, we used views as the primary metric to generate an idea of which shows were the most popular.

However, the data isn't perfect. A show released at the beginning of the six-month time period will have more time to amass views than a series released in late December. The Stranger Things series finale, for example, was released on New Year's Eve, so its real numbers will be much greater than what we'll see in this data set.

This What We Watched report feels more predictable than previous reports. Before you look through it, take a second to guess the Top 5. How many did you correctly predict? 

Emily in Rome Paris juuuuuust cracked the top 25 in its fifth season with 30.3 million views, but the drama starring Lily Collins is more popular than that stat indicates. Because Season 5 was released on Dec. 18, it didn't even get two full weeks of views, and you can bet it racked up many more millions of views in the new year. In contrast, Season 4, which was released in August and September 2024, placed fourth on Netflix's most watched shows of the second half of 2024 with 58 million views. 

Don't believe this misnomer title; a lot of people want it. Season 2 of the Kristen Bell and Adam Brody romantic comedy drew 30.4 million views. However, it seems fewer people wanted this than before, as that number was almost half of the views its first season got when it finished fifth on the list of most watched Netflix shows in the second half of 2024 with 57 million views. (To be fair, Season 1 premiered in September 2024, giving it an extra month of views compared to Season 2, which premiered in October 2025.) Netflix has renewed the series for a third season.

The comedy Boots, about a closeted gay man who joins the Marines, outperformed the buzzy comedy Nobody Wants This with 30.7 million views in its first season, but it wasn't good enough for Netflix. The streamer canceled the series. 

For all the talk and press that The Hunting Wives got, the sexy drama only finished 22nd on this list. But that's probably because the series, originally slated to air on Starz, only aired on Netflix in the United States. Had this been a globally distributed Netflix series, it likely would have been much higher. You know Europe would eat up this series about gun-toting women and lesbian trysts!

KPop Demon Hunters was the most watched ANYTHING on Netflix in all of 2025 by a lot (a staggering 482 million views), so it's not surprising that the associated lyric videos were also a hit with 31.9 million views. The caveat here is that the collection is only 16 minutes long, putting its total hours viewed standing way down the list.

Every What We Watched list includes a series that comes out of nowhere, and the Spanish psychological thriller limited series Ángela, which aired in its native country in 2024 and is based on the 2021 U.K. series Angela Black, is this year's surprise. It drew 35.7 million views.

Netflix loves its true crime docuseries, especially ones involving American women who go missing or are murdered. (There is something wrong with us.) Following the success of American Murder: Gabby Petito earlier in 2025 and American Murder: Laci Peterson in 2024, Amy Bradley Is Missing was one of two nonfiction series on this year's list, with 36.5 million views. 

The British limited series thriller Hostage, starring Suranne Jones, made this list with 36.9 million views. In all of 2025, it was just 128 million views away from another British limited series, the chart-topping Adolescence, which dominated in the first half of the year and is Netflix's second most watched series of all time. 

Unlike the first half of this year, which featured 10 foreign-language shows in the top 25, the second half of 2025 only features three. One of two Korean dramas on the list, Bon Appétit, Your Majesty was viewed 37.5 million times, but the real story here is that it ranked third in terms of hours viewed thanks to its nearly 16-hour season, one of the longest seasons on the charts. Don't expect a second season, however, as it was a limited series.

Life with the Walter Boys is good! For Netflix, at least. The YA drama My Life With the Walter Boys had 39.4 million views for its second season, which was up from its first season's tally (33.4 million) from two years ago. However, Season 1 was released in December, whereas Season 2 was released in August.

Mae Martin's miniseries about an academy for troubled teens held viewers captive with 39.8 million views. It's one of five scripted limited series to make the list.

All five seasons of Stranger Things made the top 25 somewhere, but Season 3 was the least watched of them all with 41.8 million views. Perhaps it's because most people's rewatches either just went back to Season 4 or didn't get far after starting from the beginning, or perhaps it's because Season 3 is where the show started to sour. You know it's true!

The Beast in Me, the limited series starring Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys, had 43 million views after it premiered in the middle of November. It was the highest performing scripted limited series to make this list.

You would expect most Stranger Things fans to catch up on the previous season — Season 4 — before the final run of episodes, but among seasons of Stranger Things, Season 4 was only watched more than Season 3. Still, an impressive 43 million views brought this to No. 12 on the list.

Sometimes you just want to watch a bumbling buffoon battle a bouncy baby (I guess?). Rowan Atkinson's comedy, a follow-up to 2022's Man vs. Bee, netted 43.5 million views in just a few weeks time after its Dec. 11 premiere, making it one of Netflix's biggest hits of the year. However, its short runtime, which was under two hours, made it rank low on the charts in terms of hours watched.

The second season of Stranger Things cracked the top 10 with 44.6 million views, as hype for the final season brought in a wave of rewatches and new fans. Not bad for a season of TV that's eight years old.

YouTube star Ms. Rachel was integrated into Netflix in January 2025 with a compilation of her videos to bolster programming for preschoolers, and she's proven to be a great babysitter, with 46.8 million views in the second half of the year. Season 2 just missed the top 25 with 26.2 million views — impressive numbers for a show that can already be watched for free on the internet's biggest media platform.

A new season of the extremely popular horror dramedy Wednesday meant fans would be rewatching Season 1 to remember what happened, and who can blame them after nearly three years between seasons? Season 1 got 47 million views in the second half of 2025, another impressive feat for the most-watched season of TV in Netflix's history. 

Diddy is not gonna like this! The docuseries Sean Combs: The Reckoning took advantage of Sean Combs' high-profile trial to draw in 50.8 million views, and that number is probably bigger by now given that it was released in December. The four-part docuseries used exclusive footage and interviews to delve into Combs' alleged connections to the murders of The Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac, allegations of abuse of women (including his former girlfriend Cassie Ventura), and his notorious parties, and audiences gobbled it up.

People keep wondering why Ryan Murphy gets paid big bucks to make shlock like Monster: The Ed Gein Story, and here's the answer: 55.8 million views. Despite abysmal reviews from critics, Season 3 of the serial killer anthology was another big hit for Murphy and Netflix, which is why a fourth season about Lizzie Borden is already in the works. There is data that shows Monster is cooling off, though; Season 2, which focused on the Menendez Brothers, made this list a year ago with 69.7 million views. 

Remember when the Stranger Things kids were... kids? The final season of Stranger Things inspired Netflix subscribers to revisit the magical first season, which amassed 56.6 million views in the second half of 2025. Rewatches are big on Netflix; when Squid Game Season 3 launched in June 2025, Seasons 2 and 3 ranked second and third (behind the juggernaut Adolescence) on Netflix's most-watched shows list in the first half of the year.

The final season of Squid Game slots in at No. 4 with 79 million views, but the numbers are deceiving. Squid Game Season 3 was released on June 27, 2025, meaning it had only a handful of days to make the list of the most-watched shows in the first half of 2025. Still, that tally was impressive with 71.5 million views. If we add that number to what it did in the second half of 2025, we get 150.5 million views for the year, making it one of Netflix's most-watched seasons of all time.

The biggest surprise of the second half of 2025 was Untamed, a detective show starring Eric Bana as a special agent in Yosemite National Park investigating a mysterious murder, which drew a whopping 92.8 million views. The series was such a massive hit that it changed formats. Though Untamed was originally billed as a limited series, Netflix couldn't resist renewing it for a second season once the streamer saw the eye-popping numbers. 

It's not No. 1? No, but you can probably blame Netflix's unusual release strategy for the final season of Stranger Things, which saw bunches of episodes released on the day before Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, and, most critically for this list, New Year's Eve. Still, Season 5 had 93.5 million views, and a lot more will come when Netflix releases stats for the first half of 2026. 

Finishing No. 1 was a snap for the second season of Wednesday, especially with the late-2025 release of Stranger Things' final season. Wednesday Season 2's 123.9 million views were more than any TV show on a What We Watched report not named Adolescence (which had 144.8 million views in the first half of 2025) in the last two years — when Netflix started using views as a metric and made the data available to the public — and Season 2 is now No. 5 on Netflix's most-watched English-language shows ever. (No. 1 is Wednesday Season 1.)

Graphs are cool.

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