Netflix's most-streamed show is a true crime docuseries watched 25 million hours
Twenty-one years after Aruba, Netflix got the one person who had never told the whole story on camera. In a week when almost nothing else in English worked, that was enough for No. 1.
Taken: Natalee Holloway debuted at the top of Netflix's English TV list for November 2–8 with 12.9 million views and 25.4 million hours. It did that in five days: all three episodes dropped on Wednesday, November 4. By views, nothing in TV came close that week in any language. The top non-English show, Dead-End Job, logged 8.7 million views; it won on hours, 44.4 million, only because it's longer. Among the 17 docuseries openings What's on Netflix compares, Taken ranks third, behind Michael Jackson: The Verdict (17.8 million) and Depp v. Heard (16.2 million).
That's the true crime podium: a pop star, a celebrity trial, and an 18-year-old from Alabama who went to Aruba on a graduation trip in May 2005 and never got on the flight home.
Fourth retelling, first narrator
The case has been told plenty: two Lifetime movies, in 2009 (with Tracy Pollan as Beth) and 2011, and an Oxygen docuseries in 2017. What directors Dani Sloane and Matthew Galkin got that nobody else did is Beth Holloway telling it on camera herself, from the first days in Aruba to the confession 18 years later.
"It was impossible to … walk by a newsstand without seeing Natalee Holloway's face."
— Dani Sloane, director, on growing up in the mid-2000s
The case file, for anyone born after the cable news wall-to-wall:
- May 30, 2005: Natalee, 18, leaves an Aruba nightclub with three young men, including 17-year-old Dutch resident Joran van der Sloot. Her body is never found.
- June 2005: Van der Sloot and two others are arrested and released without charges. Former Aruban deputy police chief Gerold Dompig estimates he changed his story about 40 times.
- 2010: Van der Sloot tries to extort Beth for the location of her daughter's remains. The series includes previously unreleased footage from the FBI operation around it.
- 2012: A Peruvian court sentences him to 28 years for the 2010 murder of another woman.
- 2023: Temporarily extradited to the US, he pleads guilty to extortion and wire fraud, gets 20 years to run concurrently, and confesses to killing Natalee. Aruba can't charge him because the statute of limitations has expired; the file stays open.
- August 2026: He requests a prison transfer over alleged death threats from other inmates, per NL Times.
The other woman
The National's reviewer writes that the series doesn't change what's known about the case, but leaves an uncomfortable feeling that another young woman's death might have been prevented. That woman was Stephany Flores, 21. Van der Sloot took Beth's money in May 2010 in a sting the FBI was monitoring, left Aruba uncharged, and killed Flores in Lima on May 30, 2010, five years to the day after Natalee disappeared.
In May 2010, the FBI watched Joran van der Sloot take money for a lie about Natalee's body. By the end of that month, Stephany Flores was dead in Lima.
That footage is the reason to watch, even for people who know the case by heart. The series also turns the lens on its own genre: American networks flooded Aruba in 2005, some coverage painted local investigators as incompetent, Aruban officials resented it, and Beth herself became a divisive figure on the island. A docuseries told from the mother's side doesn't skip the part where Aruba got tired of the mother.
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The chart around it
The win looks bigger against the rest of the week. Black Doves season 2 opened with 3.8 million views, about 65 percent below season 1's 10.8 million. A Dog's Perfect Christmas topped English films with 8.6 million, the weakest start among the 11 Netflix Christmas movies What's on Netflix compared. Crime docuseries, as the site put it, carry otherwise disappointing weeks.
And the No. 2 show is The One About Matthew Perry, sold on the same hook: his sister Mia speaking on camera for the first time. Netflix's fall documentary formula fits on an index card: find the family member who has never talked, and let them talk. Beth Holloway waited 18 years for a confession and three more to tell her own version, and 12.9 million views in five days says the audience was waiting with her.
Previously we wrote: Who killed the mom in The Good Daughter? The sisters got it wrong for 28 years