This Is the Best Netflix Original Series of All Time

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Netflix, founded in 1997, originally made money by sending people DVDs in the mail. Broadband access in homes allowed it to migrate its business to streaming video in 2007. The change was so successful that within less than a decade, it began to produce its own movies to entice new subscribers and then encourage them to renew their subscriptions. It currently has a production budget that rivals that of traditional studios. The business model has helped lift its paid subscriber level to 220 million worldwide. Its growth has helped launch competitors from the likes of Amazon, Apple and Disney.

The streaming industry as a whole grew substantially because of the COVID-19 pandemic. People who could not go out to watch movies in theaters had to watch films in their homes.

To determine the best Netflix original series, 24/7 Tempo reviewed audience user ratings on IMDb, an online movie database owned by Amazon, as of December 2021. Only English-language series with at least 15,000 user reviews were considered. In the case of a tie, the series with more IMDb user ratings was ranked higher. Supplemental data on premiere date, season count, episode count and cast information also came from IMDb.

There is a rich variety of candidates. These include gripping drug-cartel-themed thrillers such as “Ozark” and “Narcos,” which have run for multiple seasons. Humorous animated programs like “BoJack Horseman” and “Big Mouth” feature the talents of Will Arnett and Nick Kroll, respectively. Offbeat fare is represented by such series as “GLOW,” an acronym for the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, about female wrestlers in Los Angeles.
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If your taste runs toward black comedy, there is “Dead to Me,” pairing Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini, and “After Life,” starring British comedian Ricky Gervais. Perhaps the crown jewel among the Netflix series is “The Crown,” tracing Queen Elizabeth’s tenure as the British sovereign. It has won 21 Emmys out of 63 nominations.

The best original Netflix original series is “Narcos.” Here are the details:

  • IMDb user rating: 8.8/10
  • IMDb user reviews: 389,837 votes
  • Original series run: 2015 to 2017 (three seasons, 30 episodes)
  • Cast: Pedro Pascal, Lizbeth Eden, Wagner Moura, Boyd Holbrook

“Narcos” traces the rise of the drug kingpin Pablo Escobar and the Colombian drug cartels, their ability to corrupt society’s institutions and the inability of law enforcement to stop them. The series holds a 95% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.

Click here to read about all 50 best Netflix original series of all time.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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