Netflix's Wednesday Just Turned Stranger Things' Debut Week Record Upside Down

Jenna Ortega's take as the titular character on the Netflix streaming series "Wednesday" is clearly resonating with fans. According to Rotten Tomatoes, Season 1 holds a Fresh status of 70% with critics, but what's infinitely more impressive is the recent incarnation of the "Addams Family" racking up an 88% audience score. And the performance of the show's eight-episode debut has landed the show squarely atop Netflix's Global Top 10.

The show's success shouldn't surprise anyone, though, because of the previous innovations which came courtesy of the series' showrunners, Alfred Gough and Miles Millar. Gough and Millar pulled off a similar feat with another iconic character in the early 2000s, which is when they brought a fresh new angle to DC Comics' Superman on the hit television series, "Smallville." As they had done with Clark Kent (Tom Welling), Gough and Millar wanted to explore Wednesday Addams' teenage years.

"We were looking for a character who frankly was iconic but hadn't been explored before," Gough said while discussing the genesis of "Wednesday" during an interview (via CNBC Television). "Sort of what we did with 'Smallville.' And we came up with, you know, teenage Wednesday Addams in boarding school." The creators' concept clearly seems to have paid off. However, did you know "Wednesday" just made mincemeat out of a record once held by "Stranger Things?"

"Wednesday" folded up its fellow Netflix competitors like a lawn chair on its way to dominating Netflix's Global Top 10 following its first week of availability. The show's eight-episode debut, which is based on cartoonist Charles Addams' source material, rocketed to the No. 1 slot on the Netflix top-10 list of its most-watched TV and movies. And in doing so it broke the Season 4, Volume 1 record "Stranger Things" set for the most viewers in a series' opening week.

According to Netflix, subscribers spent 341,230,000 hours watching Wednesday Addams and her schoolmates' adventures at Nevermore Academy during the series' first week on Netflix, and that number easily trumps the 286,790,000 hours the initial seven episodes of "Stranger Things" Season 4 recorded during its release for the week of May 23 through May 29. However, Volume 1 of "Stranger Things" Season 4 dropped on May 27, so it is noteworthy to bear in mind the number of hours the show logged during those first three days alone.

Now, during its first full week of release (May 30 through June 5), Season 4 of "Stranger Things" did accumulate a total of over 335 million hours viewed (per Netflix), but Volume 1's performance still falls six million hours short of "Wednesday's" impressive, opening-week accomplishment.