Whenever there’s an adaptation of a much-loved book, fans tend to get a bit nervous: will it stay true to the source or take unacceptable liberties with the source? For every The Sandman that does big numbers and gets a great Rotten Tomatoes score, there’s a Y: The Last Man with a sub-60% audience score. So it’s nice to see that One Piece, Netflix’s adaptation of the much-loved manga, is delighting critics and viewers alike.
One Piece has sailed its way to the very top of the Netflix streaming chart, racking up over 140 million viewing hours and 18.5 million views. That puts it quite considerably ahead of number two, Who Is Erin Carter?, and in a completely different league to number 10, the fifth part of Disenchantment.
If you haven’t caught One Piece yet it’s an epic adventure saga set on the high seas and following Luffy, who wants to become King of the Pirates alongside his crew of misfit friends. The manga was a massive hit first in Japan and then more widely, and so far there have been 15 movies and 20 animated seasons based on the One Piece stories. So the best streaming service could be sticking with this show for quite some time.
What have we been watching this week?
There’s another new entry at number four: Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones. Over four episodes it visits five different communities where people live unusually long lives and attempts to discover their secrets: what do these communities have in common, and can we copy them to live longer? You can see why it’s got people interested.
Drug drama Painkiller‘s back for a fourth week in the chart, this time at number five, and it’s followed by season two of The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On.
After that it’s the third week in the chart for Depp V Heard, which appears to be critic-proof. Despite a woeful 27% on Rotten Tomatoes from the critics and an even worse 10% from viewers, Stuff says there’s “no real reason for the show to exist at all”. Meanwhile, the Chicago Sun Times says it lacks and desperately needed “esteemed journalists, law enforcement veterans and legal experts to put things in perspective” – it streamed over 6.5 million hours last week. Writing in the Hollywood Reporter, Dan Fienberg says it “could be worse, but could hardly be more pointless”.
Following closely behind is the documentary or, if you will, croc-u-mentary about the Florida Gators college football team, Untold: Swamp Kings. At number eight there’s the kids’ show Cocomelon, now in its eighth season, and at number nine there’s another kids’ show, Gabby’s Dollhouse.
Last and least, in terms of viewing figures, there’s the fifth part of Disenchantment, which will be the final season of Matt Groening’s Netflix animation. This isn’t a Netflix cancelation: it was written with the intention of finishing the story rather than brought to an unwanted abrupt end.
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