Vietnam’s number one was Korean 34 weeks — 11 titles

From 8 January to 27 August 2023, the most-watched series in Vietnam on Netflix was Korean every single week. Thirty-four weeks. Eight months without a break.

It was not one show doing it. Eleven different Korean series held that top place during the run, and it changed hands thirteen times.

The order, week by week: The Glory, Crash Course in Romance, Taxi Driver, Queenmaker, Doctor Cha, The Good Bad Mother, Bloodhounds, King the Land, Celebrity, The Uncanny Counter, Mask Girl.

That distinction is the whole point of this piece. A long run at the top usually gets told as one title’s story — a phenomenon, a juggernaut. This one is not that. It is a queue. As each series finished its moment, another Korean one was already there to take the place, and this happened thirteen times without a gap.

The other long runs

Read the last two rows again. Malaysia and Singapore ran seventeen weeks each, beginning on the same Sunday and ending on the same Sunday — 23 April to 13 August 2023 — with six titles in one and five in the other.

We are not going to explain that. Netflix publishes nothing about how its per-country rankings are produced or when titles become available in each market, and two neighbouring countries with overlapping release schedules would look exactly like this whether the cause was licensing, audience, or the ranking method itself. It is the second time this file has shown us Malaysia and Singapore, or Malaysia and Indonesia, behaving as one market; the other was a week in July 2022 when Indonesia and Malaysia had the same ten Korean titles in their top 10s. We think that is worth writing down and not worth guessing about.

Japan is the interesting short one

Japan’s sixteen weeks were held by four titles with only three changes of hands — the least turnover of any long run here. Where Vietnam’s top place was a relay, Japan’s was closer to a small number of shows each holding for a month.

Neither pattern is better. They are different shapes, and a single figure like “weeks at number one” hides which one you are looking at, which is why we publish the turnover column next to it.

South Korea, for scale

Korea’s own series chart had a Korean title at number one for 87 consecutive weeks — 17 April 2022 to 10 December 2023, a year and eight months — with thirty titles and thirty-two changes of hands.

That is the number that puts the others in proportion. A domestic chart staying domestic is not a finding. What makes Vietnam’s 34 weeks worth a page is that the same thing happened somewhere it did not have to.

What we cannot tell you

Whether any of this means more people watched. A rank is an ordering, and Netflix publishes no viewing hours by country, so a title at number one in a small market and a title at number one in a large one look identical here. Thirty-four weeks at the top is thirty-four orderings, and we would rather it stayed that size than grew into a claim about audiences we have no way to check.

Our page on how long titles stay measures the other thing — a single title’s own run, rather than the slot’s.