Last week, viewers of Netflix spent a lot of time following The Night Agent.
The thriller from Shawn Ryan and Sony Pictures TV shot to the top of the streaming service’s internal charts for the week of March 20-26. The Night Agent, which debuted March 23, amassed 168.17 million hours of viewing worldwide over its initial four days.
That figure is the third highest ever for a series debut since Netflix began releasing its weekly top 10 records in July 2021; only Wednesday (341.23 million hours) and Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (196.2 million), rank higher. In 93 countries, The Night Agent ranked first in 78 of the top 10 shows.
The Night Agent, written by Matthew Quirk and narrated by Gabriel Basso, is the story of a low-level FBI agent who works in the White House basement. He has to answer a phone that never rings, until it does, which puts him in the middle of a huge conspiracy.
“I like the idea of an underdog, someone who is the least important person in a very important place, in this case, a low-level FBI agent who works in a windowless room in the basement of the White House,” Ryan told TV’s Top 5 podcast last week. “Everyone around him is more important than him. He stumbles onto this thing and he’s suddenly, like in classic Hitchcock movies, somebody who is an ordinary person thrust into an extraordinary situation.”
The Night Agent pushed season You four (30.23 million hours for the week) out of the top spot on Netflix’s English-language TV chart. That series dropped to third among English-language shows, behind season two of Shadow and Bone (55.03 million hours of viewing).
After the second half of its first season was released on March 10, the Korean drama The Glory spent a third week at No. 1 among series in other languages. With 413.05 million hours of viewing in its first four weeks, the show now ranks sixth on Netflix’s all-time charts for shows, not in English.
