Killing Eve is having a renaissance on Netflix and the hit series has an unlikely group to thank for its success
Kill Evathe stylish and sexually tense BBC thriller that was a critical and commercial hit in Britain between 2018 and 2022 has found new life on Netflix – and it’s all to do with an unexpected age group.
The spy thriller series, which joined the top streaming service’s back catalog (in the US) on April 15, skyrocketed to number eight on the Nielsen charts – for the week of April 15 to 21 – with a whopping 719 million minutes watched . in the first week on the platform. That’s a bit behind the number one show of the time, which was the Fallout TV show on Prime Video – it was watched 2.6 billion minutes in the first seven days of its release. To give Kill Eva however, it is due to Amazon’s TV adaptation Fallout is a brand new series, while Kill Eva was first released in 2018.
Unlike other major licensed show successes that have dominated the Netflix charts, such as To takebut the past twelve months Kill EvaThe popularity of the film is not driven by 18 to 49 year olds. Per VarietyThe really interesting thing isn’t so much the numbers, but Where where those numbers come from. A third even Kill Eva‘s viewers were 65 years or older. That 33% share of the audience is also the largest among Netflix’s different age categories, according to Nielsen (again via Variety).
The Netflix effect
So, what’s behind it Kill Eva‘s unexpected success among people over 60? It seems like it took advantage of the same phenomenon that was created too To take And Brooklyn Nine-Nine big hits, with a brand new audience finding and falling in love with the shows after moving to the streamer.
As for the former, To take became a major hit for Netflix in August 2023, and its subsequent popularity irritated writers at the height of the Hollywood writers’ strikes. It also continued to break streaming records on Netflix and Peacock that month, and viewers under the age of 25 became obsessed with the legal drama on the platform itself and social media apps, such as TikTok.
Netflix’s licensing of shows such as Kill Eva, is thus especially beneficial for TV productions that generated both positive word-of-mouth, high critical acclaim, and multiple awards during their original runs, but whose best days appear to be behind them. If Kill Eva continues to draw viewers, it’s certainly possible that it will end up on our list of the best Netflix shows in the near future.
As said, as successful as Kill Eva was on Netflix in its first week, it couldn’t compete with that Fallout, also known as one of the best Prime Video shows ever made. Nielsen points out that it’s rare for a show to get more than two billion minutes in consecutive weeks, but… Fallout has done just that with 2.9 billion minutes in its first five days on Prime Video and another 2.6 billion minutes the following week. When you consider that this is only eight episodes, it’s all the more impressive. It is the first two billion title to reach these figures without being on Netflix, which has a much larger market share than its rivals. So no wonder Fallout season 2 was announced just days after its predecessor arrived.