I am also included in the viewership stats for the stated month, after recently watching The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix first season with 7 intriguing episodes. Personally, at the moment, it’s one of the best chess series or shows on Netflix that I had watched in a while, after Queen of Katwe, especially if you enjoy playing chess, otherwise, if you don’t understand or have no interest in the sport whatsoever, obviously you’d opt for Stranger Things.
The Queen’s Gambit is currently making waves amongst audiences; Chess sets have experienced a huge surge in popularity following the release of Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit and it has now broken a Netflix viewing record to become the streaming service’s biggest scripted limited series ever.
The drama, which follows the rise of chess prodigy Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy) in the middle of the 20th century. Like all the viewership data that Netflix has released this year, these new numbers reflect how many people “chose to watch” — in other words, how many people watched at least two minutes of a given show or movie. In the case of “The Queen’s Gambit,” the number is 62 million households for the first 28 days of release, making it Netflix’s most popular scripted limited series ever.
Announcing the news on Twitter, the official Netflix account wrote: “A record-setting 62 million households chose to watch The Queen’s Gambit in its first 28 days, making it Netflix’s biggest scripted limited series to date.”
The limited series – a term for a self-contained miniseries with no plans for a future continuation – has also prompted a surge in interest in chess itself.
The Queen’s Gambit, the 1983 novel upon which the series was based, has also entered the New York Times bestseller list in the wake of the series’ success.
The Queen’s Gambit now ranks among the most widely viewed pieces of content on Netflix across all categories. At 62 million household views, the series sits just 2 million behind the third season of Stranger Things, at 64 million, although still some way off the site’s most popular original movie, Extraction, which managed a reported 99 million viewers in a month.
