Netflix’s epic alien invasion series 3 Body Problem, from the same showrunners behind HBO’s Game of Thrones, is one of the biggest TV shows in the world right now across every major streaming platform. Despite mixed reviews, it’s still riding high a little more than a week after its release, along with other series like Guy Ritchie’s Netflix gangster romp The Gentlemen and FX/Hulu’s Shogun, a brutal saga about feudal Japan that feels like a spiritual successor to Thrones.
According to the latest data from the streaming search engine Reelgood, those are some of the most popular TV shows right now across all of the major streamers — from Netflix to Max, Apple TV+, Hulu, Disney+, and Peacock.
Reelgood Streaming Charts monitor 20 million viewing decisions each month across every streaming platform in the US. For the 7-day period that ended on March 27, the 10 shows that topped Reelgood’s latest TV chart are as follows:
- 3 Body Problem (Netflix)
- Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV (Max)
- Shogun (Hulu)
- The Gentlemen (Netflix)
- Palm Royale (Apple TV+)
- Apples Never Fall (Peacock)
- X-Men ’97 (Disney+)
- Manhunt (Apple TV+)
- Resident Alien (Peacock)
- The Regime (Max)
As I pointed out last week, this collection of shows continues to be quite a mixed bag. Titles like Max’s The Regime and Peacock’s Apples Never Fall have proved, at least to me, a disappointment and mostly boring, while The Gentlemen has been quite a successful and entertaining crime drama for Netflix — and Shogun will almost certainly end up on every critic’s Best TV shows of 2024 list.
To continue with the divergent level of quality on this list, I’m at a loss to explain why a show like Apple’s Palm Royale exists (it’s meandering and not really funny, even though it purports to be a comedy) while 3 Body Problem is an adaptation of a celebrated series of sci-fi novels from Chinese author Liu Cixin that were once thought to be un-adaptable.
I didn’t love the Netflix series, but I did think it was pretty decent. The main things I’d nitpick about it, such as its thinly drawn characters like the Oxford Five, are, I suspect, mostly a function of having just eight episodes over the first season. That’s a pretty standard length for Netflix TV shows these days, but it does mean the plot and other elements of a story are sometimes rushed as a result. At any rate, here’s hoping for a Season 2 announcement any day now.