“Sex Education” is apparently on a similar viewership track, but there’s no concrete explanation for the context of those numbers.

Penn Badgley in “You”
Courtesy of Lifetime
As a great Greek thinker once mused, “If I hover my mouse over an icon for a Netflix show and it starts auto-playing in my browser, have I really watched it?” As part of its quarterly earnings report, the streaming giant declared that 40 million households had viewed “You,” the Penn Badgley-led series that premiered on Lifetime last summer before finding a new home at Netflix. With Season 2 of the series still on the way, those numbers represent the total from the series’ first four weeks of availability on the platform.
That figure is similar to the one provided for “Bird Box,” the film that in addition to spawning a rash of blindfolded antics across the globe, also drew eyeballs from 45 million subscribers. That number, first sent out in a tweet, was eventually clarified to Variety by a Netflix spokesperson to mean that 45 million accounts had watched at least “70% of the total running time including credits.”