In today’s day and age, the things we choose to watch can often be the most popular ones, filled with special effects and heavy topics that suck us in to keep watching for hours. These pull us in the easiest, but what goes a bit under the radar of many may be a bit more interesting.

While shows like Stranger Things or The Witcher are very engaging and binge-able, many people don’t realize the capabilities of the documentary category. Out of nearly 6,000 shows and movies available on Netflix in the US, almost 600 of those are documentaries. With new ones constantly being released, it is logical that some are bound to rise to great heights on the Netflix charts.

The most popular of these documentaries have a trend of being crime shows and movies, including Making a Murderer with 19 million views and Inventing Anna with 55 million hours watched. Along with this trend, The Tinder Swindler, a documentary released in February of 2022, gained 166 million views in just 28 days and has risen to become the number one viewed Netflix documentary today.

Those who have seen these documentaries know how much they keep you watching, leaving you on a cliffhanger at the end of the episode, so you have to keep watching. This strategy is especially effective with true crime shows, keeping you on the edge of your seat right until the end of the show.

But no matter what show it is, Netflix does have something for everyone, so it might be worth giving the lesser-known titles a try, and documentaries might be an excellent place to start.

Sources:
Grantt, Kareem. The Highest Rated Netflix Documentaries, According to IMDb. https://collider.com/highest-rated-netflix-documentaries/. Published May 17, 2022. Accessed Sep. 19, 2022.

Dams, Tim. How Netflix is Shaking Up the Documentary World. https://tbivision.com/2019/01/21/how-netflix-has-shaken-up-the-documentary-world/ Published Jan 21, 2019. Accessed Sep. 16, 2022.