Florence Pugh’s Netflix Western Is Officially One of the Streamer’s Biggest Miniseries Ever

He has covered everything from Marvel to the Oscars, and Marvel at the Oscars. He also writes obsessively about the box office, charting the many hits and misses that are released weekly, and how their commercial performance shapes public perception. In his time at Collider, he has also helped drive diversity by writing stories about the multiple Indian film industries, with a goal of introducing audiences to a whole new world of cinema. 

Despite a soft start, Netflix’s new Western limited series has emerged as one of its most resilient hits in months. The eight-episode series, featuring an A-list cast and adapted from classic literary material, is second only to Adolescence when it comes to viewer retention. That four-part drama emerged as a word-of-mouth sensation in 2025, eventually becoming Netflix’s second-biggest English-language series of all time with more than 140 million views across three months. The new Western has spent five weeks on the Netflix top-10 charts so far, having added 2.2 million views in its fifth week of release.

The show debuted with 6.5 million views in week one, followed by more than 12 million views in its second week. Official numbers shared by Netflix put the show’s third-week haul at 6.2 million and fourth-week total at 3.6 million. This takes the limited series’ total viewership to 30 million. But the key metric here is hugely impressive audience retention. According to a new report, the new hit has delivered the best multiple for a limited series on Netflix since Adolescence. This puts it ahead of fellow Netflix limited series such as His & Hers and I Will Find You, both of which ultimately hit the 100 million views milestone and are among Netflix’s biggest streaming hits of all time.

Four icons and four completely different ways of walking into trouble.
This is the one you would have been out there, why it fits, and what it would have cost you.

You have never explained yourself and you have never needed to,
because people work out fairly quickly that you are the most capable person in the room
without you ever having to mention it.

• Eastwood built the character out of everything he refused to do, stripping away the
  backstory, the speeches and every bit of reassurance until only the competence was left.
• You keep your own counsel, and while other people occasionally find that unnerving, you
  have never felt any real need to fix it for them.
• The Dollars films work because he genuinely is in it for himself right up until the
  moment he is not, and he never explains that part either.
• You would be gone before anybody got a chance to thank you.

You are the funniest person in most rooms and the most loyal
person in all of them, and you would be genuinely insulted if somebody suggested those two
things were in any tension.

• Doc has no real reason to be in this fight beyond the fact that his friend is in it,
  which is the only reason he has ever needed for anything.
• You lead with wit, and it does a very effective job of hiding how seriously you take the
  handful of people you actually care about.
• Val Kilmer’s performance is the most quoted in the entire genre because the jokes keep
  getting sharper as the situation gets worse.
• You would spend everything you had on this and still describe it as a good week.

You never wanted this job, and you took it anyway because the
alternative was standing there watching somebody less careful do it badly, which is the most
Western reason there has ever been.

• Earp is the reluctant authority figure, a man who came to town specifically to be left
  alone and somehow ended up answerable for all of it.
• You are protective by instinct, so when something goes wrong your first thought is who
  is exposed rather than who is to blame.
• These films understand that keeping order costs far more than breaking it, and that the
  person holding the line almost never gets thanked.
• You would do the whole thing again, and you would complain about it the entire time.

Nobody has ever successfully talked you out of something you had
already decided was right, and a long line of grown adults has found that out the hard way.

• Mattie is the most relentless character in the Western canon and she manages it through
  argument, paperwork and flat refusal rather than a fast draw.
• You have no patience for being managed, so you negotiate, you check the details and you
  turn up exactly when you said you would.
• True Grit is the rare Western where the moral centre is the youngest person on screen
  and every adult around her has to catch up.
• You would get what you came for, and the film is honest about what that takes out of
  you.

The New Western Series Received Excellent Reviews

• Image via. Netflix

• Image via. Netflix

• Image via. Netflix

• Image via Netflix

• Image via. Netflix

Image via. Netflix

Image via. Netflix

Image via. Netflix

Image via Netflix

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• Image via. Netflix

• Image via. Netflix

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• Image via. Netflix

Image via. Netflix

Image via. Netflix

Image via. Netflix

Image via Netflix

Image via. Netflix

We’re talking, of course, about East of Eden. Created by Zoe Kazan and based on the classic novel by John Steinbeck, the show stars an MCU veteran in Florence Pugh, a future MCU star/X-Man with Christopher Abbott, as well as Mike Faist in the lead roles, along with Hoon Lee and Ciarán Hinds. The show holds a “Certified Fresh” 88% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, where the consensus reads, “Zoe Kazan imbues her legacy adaptation with delicious moral quandaries and sumptuous landscapes, but it’s the expanded character work from Pugh and Lee that brings justice and dignity to this new canon of East of Eden.”

Interestingly, Kazan’s grandfather, Elia Kazan, directed the acclaimed East of Eden film adaptation in 1955. Earlier this year, Netflix delivered another hit adaptation of a classic book series: Little House on the Prairie, which was also a major hit for Netflix and has already been renewed for a second season. Kazan is now working on a totally different adaptation of Lonesome Dove.

East of Eden is streaming now on Netflix. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.

East of Eden

This Netflix mini-series adapts John Steinbeck’s iconic novel East of Eden, which is a multigenerational saga set in California’s Salinas Valley, exploring themes of good and evil, free will, and human nature. It follows the intertwined lives of the Trask and Hamilton families, drawing parallels to the biblical story of Cain and Abel.