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Unless you’ve been trapped in the Upside Down, you know the Stranger Things finale, “The Rightside Up,” arrived on New Year’s Eve to close out five seasons of TV in a single, feature-length episode. Inevitably, not everyone was pleased with the choices the Duffer Brothers made in wrapping up their beloved sci-fi series. And while Netflix would surely love to claim the show went out on a wave of universal acclaim, that’s not what really matters, is it? Far more important are the ratings, and Stranger Things certainly delivered.
Now, obviously, there’s precedent for Stranger Things racking up streaming numbers. It’s always been popular, and the first two volumes of season five proved fans hadn’t lost interest despite the extended passage of time since 2022’s season four.
A Netflix press release shared today, covering the week of December 29-January 4, trumpets the season finale as “giving Netflix its most views ever on a New Year’s Day and putting the season at No. 1 on the English TV list with 31.5 million views. The season also officially joined the Most Popular English TV list, assuming the No. 9 spot with 105.7 million total views. Stranger Things 4 currently holds the No. 3 spot.” (Number one is still Wednesday season one, in case you were wondering.)
The trickle-down effect benefited earlier Stranger Things seasons as well: “viewers put Season 1 at No. 3 (7.6 million views) on the English TV list and launched Season 2 to No. 5 (5.5 million), Season 3 to No. 7 (5 million), and Season 4 to No. 8 (4.8 million), making this the sixth record-setting week that the English series has had all its seasons on the list.”
Even the haters tuned in, in other words. Some of them might have even tuned in repeatedly, scouring through episodes to make sure their complaints about Mike’s Eleven theory or the lack of explanation of the Henry-Vecna-briefcase-cave continuum were as accurate as possible.
There’s one more rung of the Stranger Things ladder for Netflix to climb, at least until the animated series (and the potential spin-off) hit the streamer: a making-of documentary going behind the scenes of season five, which arrives January 12.
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