What the weeks-in-top-10 counter counts

On consecutive weeks it adds exactly one

Not “almost always”. Every one of the 287,291 consecutive-week pairs in the file adds exactly one.

After a gap it keeps counting

This is the part that matters. A title leaves a country’s top 10 and comes back weeks or months later. The counter does not restart.

We cannot explain the 424 that restart. Netflix publishes no note about the counter, and nothing else in the row distinguishes those cases from the 21,072 that continue. We report the split and stop there.

Most Korean chart lives are one unbroken block

The scattered cases above are the memorable ones, so it is worth saying how rare they are. Of 11,181 Korean cells, 7,730 last two weeks or more. Of those, 87% have no gap at all — they arrive, stay, and leave once.

One-week cells are left out of this table. Their span and their streak are both one, so counting them would make “unbroken” true by definition rather than by measurement — there are 3,451 of them, and that is its own finding, and it is not half: 30.9% of Korean chart lives are a single week.

The longest counters, and what they are not

Once you know the field is cumulative, the largest values become readable — as long as the span is printed next to them. 72 weeks for Crash Landing on You in Japan is spread across 96 weeks of calendar, and its longest unbroken run is 53.

Read the last two columns against the first. Squid Game’s 43 weeks in India span 201 weeks — nearly four years — with 25 of them unbroken. A headline that turned that counter into “43 straight weeks” would be describing something that did not happen.

The largest counter in the whole file is not Korean: Lottie Dottie Chicken in Brazil, at 133 weeks over 166 — a children’s title, which is what the top of this particular measure looks like in most countries.

What this means if you use the number

• “25 weeks in the top 10” is not 25 weeks in a row. It can be 25 weeks spread over two years, with the title absent for most of them.
• It is per country and per chart. Every one of the 191,537 cells starts at 1, so the number is not a global tally arriving in each market.
• Seasons count separately, because Netflix lists them separately. Two seasons of one show are two counters.
• The largest we found is 133 across all titles, and 72 among Korean ones.

This is why every run length on this site is computed from the weeks themselves rather than read off the counter. What a run is, and what leaving a chart looks like, is on the exit page; how often a return is really a new season is on the returns page.