“There’s a sense around Hollywood that Netflix can make something a hit more than any other service. “Netflix has emerged this year as the clear winner of the streaming wars,” says Matthew Belloni, founder of the digital media company Puck and host of the weekly Ringer podcast The Town. (Amazon is next with closer to 200 million-though some of that has to be attributed to streaming being offered with a Prime shipping subscription-while Disney+ trails with some 150 million and services like Max, Hulu, Apple TV+, and Paramount+ lag behind with under 100 million.) More than that, Netflix has a reputation as the industry leader in creating new phenomena from an original or acquired title. With nearly 250 million subscribers, Netflix has a big lead on its competitors. In fact, the success of Suits is less a new gain for Netflix than further proof of its current dominance of the industry. In 2023, that can be enough to drive huge numbers of viewers to almost anything. Simply put, the show became available on Netflix. Still, there’s an easier explanation for the Suits-aissance, one that has less to do with what or why and more to do with where. And plenty have seen something attractively familiar in the Suits formula: It’s small-screen popcorn, the kind of comfort food that never goes out of fashion, a surprisingly natural fit in the modern bingeing era, when people are often just looking for something to put on while they scroll through social media. There’s also the show’s unexpected ubiquity on TikTok, though that was arguably driven by its exploding popularity as much as the reverse. There’s one pretty obvious question to ask here, and I won’t be the first to ask it: Why? Some have cited the Meghan Markle of it all before leaving showbiz for the British royal family, the future Duchess of Sussex played paralegal Rachel Zane for seven seasons. By October, it had broken another record, going 12 consecutive weeks as the top streaming show, according to Nielsen. But this past summer’s Suits boom was unprecedented in the magnitude of its reach: Available on both Netflix and Peacock (where its ninth and final season remains exclusively), the show repeatedly surpassed 3.5 billion viewing minutes in a single week, setting a new record for acquired titles. Of course, a broadcast hit enjoying a second life on streaming is nothing new network sitcoms like Friends and The Office experienced similar years-later spikes when they hit streamers in the early 2010s. Adams) taken under the wing of a shark attorney (Gabriel Macht), the show was a late pillar of the “blue sky” era, when USA was churning out character-driven, case-of-the-week prime-time dramas like Monk, Psych, and Burn Notice-shows that scream “2010s weekend hangover fodder” more than “2020s mass cultural event.” Chronicling the caseload of a brainy, deceptive legal wunderkind (Patrick J. Since it hit the streaming service in June, millions of people have watched billions of minutes of Suits, the legal procedural that aired on USA Network for nine seasons from 2011 to 2019. The defining television event of 2023 was actually a defunct cable drama that appeared on Netflix just two weeks after Succession came to an end. When it came to commanding attention spans, Jesse Armstrong’s withering HBO tragicomedy couldn’t compete with a different portrait of sharply dressed yuppies exchanging witty barbs in Manhattan office buildings. But if the lists tell one story, the numbers tell another. The critics have spoken and they mostly agree: Succession was the TV show of 2023.
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