The ‘Suits’ Effect: Why Older British Network Shows Are Doing The Business For Netflix UK

deadline.com:

EXCLUSIVE: In a week that controversy surrounding Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story was generating headlines aplenty for Netflix, an old British show quietly slipped into the streamer’s UK top 10, neatly demonstrating something of a 2024 viewing trend.

The Toby Jones-starring drama series Capital premiered on the BBC in 2015 and yet here it was sitting sixth in Netflix’s most-watched list after being acquired by the streamer almost a decade later.

The show made a bit of a splash when it launched on the BBC years ago, but didn’t exactly go gangbusters. Yet in the past few weeks, the internet has been awash with article headlines such as “Netflix has just quietly added a forgotten BBC masterpiece” in relation to the rather parochial Capital, which starred Jones as one of the residents of a road in South London who starts receiving unsettling postcards.

Capital’s success is no one-off in this era of cannibalized viewing. While it has long been said that audiences turn to familiarity when faced with an over-abundance of choice — look no further than Suits — Deadline analysis supplied by Digital-i shows 2024 has been the year viewers opted for older shows that they may have missed first time around.