Each fall, a handful of new shows that air on traditional broadcast and cable networks don't even make it past the first few episodes.
They're canceled midway through the season because they can't garner enough viewers for the networks to justify having showing them.
But Netflix, which releases all episodes of a season of its shows at once, doesn't have to worry about hooking people on its shows early.
The company is notoriously secretive when it comes to sharing any sort of viewership data — it has a treasure trove of it — but this week it shared the particular episode in handful of shows that got people, in Netflix parlance, "hooked."
For some shows, it happens as early as the second episode. For others, it takes as many as eight episodes.
Netflix defines a viewer becoming hooked when 70% or more of them watch a particular episodes and then go on to complete the first season.
As the chart below shows, the episode that keeps viewers coming back varies depending on the show.
It only took people two episodes to get hooked on "Breaking Bad," for example, while it took them three to get hooked on "Orange is the New Black" and five to get hooked on "Daredevil," both of which are Netflix originals. A few years ago, Netflix broke the rules of TV when it began to dump all episodes of its original TV shows online at once. Viewers don't have to wait until the next week to find out happens to a certain character — they can binge on all 12 episodes of a show at once.
This has allowed creators to stories differently and not have to worry about fitting something within a traditional half hour time frame.
It has also allowed shows to work on Netflix that may not have worked on traditional TV.
Vince Gilligan, the creator of "Breaking Bad," has credited Netflix for keeping the show on TV, saying that without Netflix, the show wouldn't have "have even lasted beyond season two."
Netflix has even brought back some shows that didn't necessarily work on TV but may have been more conducive to the Netflix model, like "Arrested Development," which was canceled by Fox after three sesasons but got another one on Netflix.
Here are more than two dozen shows that are on Netflix along with the episode that got people hooked (the asterisk denotes show is not available on Netflix in all countries it operates.):
- Arrow, Episode 8*
- Bates Motel, Episode 2
- Better Call Saul, Episode 4*
- Bloodline, Episode 4
- BoJack Horseman, Episode 5
- Breaking Bad, Episode 2*
- Daredevil, Episode 5
- Dexter, Episode 3*
- Gossip Girl, Episode 3
- Grace & Frankie, Episode 4
- HIMYM, Episode 8
- House of Cards, Episode 3*
- Mad Men, Episode 6*
- Marco Polo, Episode 3
- OITNB, Episode 3
- Once Upon A Time, Episode 6
- Pretty Little Liars, Episode 4
- Scandal, Episode 2
- Sense8, Episode 3*
- Sons of Anarchy, Episode 2*
- Suits, Episode 2*
- The Blacklist, Episode 6*
- The Killing, Episode 2
- The Walking Dead, Episode 2*
- Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Episode 4
Disclosure: Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Business Insider's parent company, Axel Springer, is a Netflix board member.
