'East of Eden' Is Netflix's Least-Watched No. 1 Show Since March

Florence Pugh's Steinbeck miniseries drew 6.5 million views. Netflix's 'American Primeval' opened with 10.4 million.

Florence Pugh's Cathy Ames now sits at the top of Netflix's English-language TV chart. She got there on 6.5 million views.

That one number tells two stories. Netflix's own Top 10 post said audiences "flocked" to the Salinas Valley for "East of Eden." Deadline called it a soft opening. By Deadline's count, it was the lowest total to lead the chart since late March, when the second season of "One Piece" topped it in its third week with 5.9 million.

Zoe Kazan's seven-episode limited series adapts John Steinbeck's 1952 novel. Christopher Abbott and Mike Faist play the Trask brothers, Adam and Charles, and Netflix lists Tracy Letts, Martha Plimpton, Hoon Lee and Ciarán Hinds in the cast. Letts plays Cyrus Trask, the family patriarch. TVLine notes he's one of Greta Gerwig's regulars, the dad in "Lady Bird." That's a lot of prestige behind a number this size.

There are two fair points in the show's favor. It premiered Oct. 1, three days into the chart week Netflix labels Sept. 28, so the count doesn't cover the whole tracking week. And it won a slow week. No other English series on the list got past 6 million.

The comparison that stings is the one Deadline ran against Netflix's other period dramas. "American Primeval," Mark L. Smith's 1857 frontier series with Taylor Kitsch and Betty Gilpin, opened with 10.4 million views at the start of 2025. "All the Light We Cannot See," the World War II miniseries from Shawn Levy and Steven Knight, pulled 9.8 million in its first week. "East of Eden" came in 3.9 million behind the first and 3.3 million behind the second.

The chart is even rougher on it closer up. "Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story," the fourth season of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan's true-crime anthology, finished second in its third week with 5.7 million views, less than a million behind. It's now at 32.3 million total, and Netflix says the "Monster" franchise has topped 325 million views across all its seasons. So a true-crime show in its third week nearly matched a Steinbeck premiere in its first.

Netflix is pointing to how far the show has traveled. Deadline reported that the streamer highlighted a top 10 spot in 80 countries and No. 1 in 22 of them.

Netflix also pointed to the bookstores. It said the adaptation helped Penguin Classics sell 200% more copies of the novel since the series was announced, and its own post said the show sent the book back to the top of the book charts. On TV, "East of Eden" opened soft. The novel didn't.

Source: Deadline, retrieved October 7, 2026. Other sources: Netflix, tvline.com.