It may have taken Walter White nearly an entire season to become Heisenberg, and Frank Underwood 13 episodes to become VP (spoiler alert!), but it turns out fans committed to these series long before those plot twists unfolded. Hint: it wasn’t in the pilot episode.
Netflix analysed its global streaming data across the inaugural seasons of some of today’s most popular programmes - both Netflix original series and programmes that premiered on other networks - looking for signals that pointed to when viewers became hooked. It turns out that when commercial breaks and appointment viewing are stripped away and consumers can watch an entire season as they choose, you can see fandom emerge. That is, 70% of viewers who watched the hooked episode went on to complete season one or – more poetically – when members were hooked and there was no turning back.
While the data identified the hooked episode, it was shy on pinpointing exact moments, but we have a few ideas of our own to help jog your memory... For starters, in Breaking Bad it may have taken the flip of a coin to decide whether Jesse or Walt would put the finishing blow on Krazy 8, but when the decrepit heap of a former drug dealer rains down from Jesse’s ceiling, there’s no denying viewers would stay to see how the season cleaned up (episode 2). Speaking of messes, Crazy Eyes drops both poems and fluids in her rollercoaster romance with Piper in Orange is the New Black, but it was likely the throw of a pie to defend her (then) bae’s honour that had members asking for seconds (episode 3). For Dexter another episode equals another body, this time courtesy of the "Ice Truck Killer”, but our money’s on Dexter’s trip down memory lane reliving his inaugural kill that was the real tipping point - after all, fans never forget the first time (episode 3).
While around the world the hooked episode was relatively consistent, slight geographic differences did present themselves. The Dutch, for instance, tend to fall in love with series the fastest, getting hooked one episode ahead of most countries regardless of the programme. Germans showed early fandom for Arrow whereas France fell first for How I Met Your Mother. In Better Call Saul, Jimmy McGill won Brazilians over one episode quicker than Mexicans. In Australia and New Zealand, viewers prove to hold out longer across the board, with members getting hooked one to two episodes later than the rest of the world on almost every programme. Despite these differences, the hooked moment had no correlation to audience size or attrition, regardless of programme, episode number or country.
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