First debuting on Netflix back in September 2020, the series from Yellow Bird is based on the detective found in the Henning Makell novels. The series was developed by Ben Harris and saw a 6 episode second season arrive on February 17th, 2022.
Given the naming convention of the show’s second season, it almost certainly opens up the possibility of the series almost becoming an anthology whereby we could pick up the story years down the road with a new case. That almost has to be the case given that season 2 wraps up quite nicely.
As per other renewals at Netflix, it’ll all come down to performance and so far, it’s not looking too good.
Netflix measures the performance of its shows using many metrics including how many people start a show and how many go on to finish it.
As we’ll come onto in a second it looks as though the second season failed to really make much of an impact at least globally. It did, however, perform well in some key Nordic regions which makes sense given the source material.
The second season landed on Netflix on a Thursday which is when they typically launch some of their weaker shows keeping Fridays for the big new releases. There was also very limited promotion for the show with a press release for season 2 and a trailer but beyond that, very little push.
One other bad sign for the show in our view is that it scored zero coverage on Netflix’s two editorial sites with those being Tudum and Netflix Queue. We often see the amount of coverage a show getting on those reflects Netflix’s own confidence in shows and movies.
Netflix’s top 10 global data reveals that the show failed to enter the top 10s. In the first week, it would’ve had to achieve 11.04M hours viewed to beat out The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window and 11.46M to beat out jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy the following week.
Raw daily top 10 data can give us insights into where the show is performing well. According to FlixPatrol data, season 2 failed to make much of an impact in English language countries with it only appearing in the US TV top 10s for 3 days before dropping out and the UK for 10 days before dropping out.
Unsurprisingly, Young Wallander did perform well in the Nordic regions such as Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. it also did well in some central European countries including Germany, the Netherlands, and Austria.
YouTube performance can also indicate performance on Netflix according to Puck New’s Matthew Belloni. The season 2 trailer only scored 85K views (as of March 21st) compared to 708K season 1.
Finally, IMDb’s MovieMeter can often provide good visibility on popularity. It tracks incoming traffic to the show’s IMDb, a website that has over half a billion monthly hits. Season 1 managed to become the 21st most popular title on IMDb the week after it landed on Netflix. Season 2 looks to have peaked so far at 56th on the chart. This isn’t as dramatic drop as it could’ve been which could spell that viewership carried over from s1 to 2.
