James R | On 19, Oct 2020

Ratched has racked up almost 50 million appointments with Netflix users in its first month on release.

The series, which stars Sarah Paulson and hails from the prolific Ryan Murphy and co-creator Evan Romansky, tells the story of asylum nurse Mildred Ratched before One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In 1947, Mildred arrives in Northern California to seek employment at a leading psychiatric hospital where new and unsettling experiments have begun on the human mind.

“This brazen, bloody piece of pulp fiction is less One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and more American Horror Story: Asylum 2,” we wrote in our review of the show.

Nonetheless, despite a mixed reception, the star-studded drama has attracted heaps of attention, with 48 million members choosing to watch the show in its first 28 days since its debut – making it Netflix’s biggest original Season 1 of the year so far.

Of course, those figures are worth taking with a large pinch of salt. Where before, the streaming giant classed a “view” as someone watching 70 per cent of a movie or a single episode of a show. Now, it’s changed its measurements that it says is more accurate. Now, Netflix will count the number of times that an account chooses to watch a title for “at least 2 minutes”, which it deems as “long enough to indicate the choice was intentional”, as opposed to an accidental click.

By that measure, for example, the Chris Hemsworth film Extraction racked up 99 million views in the first four weeks after its release.

Here’s the trailer for Ratched:

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