Back in December, as a tortuous 2020 was finally coming to a close, Netflix’s highly-anticipated Bridgerton became the late-breaking belle of the streaming ball. Hitting just as our collective pandemic exhaustion butted up against television’s typical mid-holiday lull, the fizzy Shonda Rhimes romance almost immediately found itself garnering wall-to-wall coverage from critics (including Paste) the Internet over
The takes feeding the ever-hungry flames of Twitter’s Trending Topics forge and generating enough #content to keep the pop culture podcast ecosystem rolling in takes well past the end of the calendar year. It hardly came as a surprise, then, to find Netflix self-reporting, a little over a month later, that the platform had seen a staggering 63 million households binge the series’ debut season in its first four weeks—a new record, given the mere 62 million who had reportedly binged Netflix’s other blockbuster 2020 hit, The Queen’s Gambit, over the same period.
Incredibly, that new record stood for barely a month. By the end of January, with an astonishing 70 million reported household binges to its first-month name, a French heist drama called Lupin came out of nowhere and absolutely crushed it. Again, Twitter had become #take central. Again, the pop culture podcast cycle was running at full-tilt. Again, critics—this one absolutely included—couldn’t get enough. The cultural power of Lupin felt undeniable. And with Part 1’s wild, beach-set cliffhanger of an ending, so too did the possibility that the series might break its own record whenever Part 2 eventually arrived. I mean, who wasn’t holding their breath over the fate of France’s sweetest Arsène-loving teen? Personally, I was ready for Assane (Omar Sy) to burn down whatever abandoned château he might find, if it meant saving Raoul (Etan Simon) from Pellegrini’s creepy be-scarf’d henchman (Adama Niane).