Now in its seventh and final season, Netflix’s landmark prison drama “Orange Is The New Black” is almost as big a hit in France as it is in the U.S., according to data-analysis firm Parrot Analytics.
France is the show’s No. 1 non-English-speaking market for the second consecutive year on a per-capita basis, the firm said.
Parrot Analytics measures the demand from a blend of data points, including video-streaming consumption and social media. According to its data, the new season of “Orange Is the New Black” got 14.44 demand expressions per capita in France on its release date on July 26, behind only the U.K.’s 14.72 and the U.S.’ 17.82. France therefore pulled in 81% of the level of demand seen in the show’s home market, a 30% increase compared with Season 6 last year.
Ahead of its launch, the series was already trending highly in France, where it turned out to be the sixth most in-demand series in the country, behind “Stranger Things,” “La Casa de Papel,” “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “Lucifer” and “Black Mirror,” according to Parrot Analytics. French demand for “Orange Is the New Black” was up 26% in the lead-up to the new season compared to the previous one.
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“‘Orange Is the New Black’ continues to perform well in France. In the lead-up to this latest season release we are seeing the growth of audience demand in France for this Netflix Original outstrip even that observed in the United States,” said Samuel Stadler, VP of Marketing at Parrot Analytics.
“Audience demand in the lead-up to the last season has only grown 17% compared to this latest season in the United States – and yet in France we observe a 26% increase in demand for the same time period,” said Stadler.
This final season of “Orange Is the New Black” has been applauded by fans and critics alike. Variety praised the series for “changing the game by testing the limits of what streaming television could do” and said that “since it first debuted, it’s become such a fixture that saying goodbye to the women of Litchfield Penitentiary for good feels downright surreal.”
Turning the spotlight on women in prison, the series was seen as a “real gamble” for Netflix in its early days, said Cindy Holland, the vice president for original content at Netflix, during a keynote at the INTV Conference in Jerusalem in March.
“It wasn’t designed to work around the world, but it absolutely did….Everyone expected ‘House of Cards’ to be good, but ‘Orange Is the New Black,’ no one saw it coming,” said Holland.