Luciane Buchanan and Gabriel Basso in ‘The Night Agent.’

Dan Power/Netflix

Netflix viewers spent a lot of time tracking The Night Agent last week.

The thriller from Sony Pictures TV and creator Shawn Ryan rocketed to No. 1 on the streamer’s internal charts for the week of March 20-26. The Night Agent, which premiered March 23, amassed 168.17 million hours of viewing worldwide over its first four days.

That figure is the third highest ever for a series debut since Netflix started releasing its weekly top 10 lists in July 2021; only Wednesday (341.23 million hours) and Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (196.2 million) rank higher. The Night Agent was among the top 10 series in 93 countries and No. 1 in 78 of those.

Based on a novel by Matthew Quirk, The Night Agent follows a low-level FBI agent (Gabriel Basso) who works in the basement of the White House. He’s tasked with manning a phone that never rings — until it does, putting him in the middle of a far-reaching conspiracy.

“I like the idea of an underdog, someone who is the least important person in a very important place, in this case, a low-level FBI agent who works in a windowless room in the basement of the White House,” Ryan told The Hollywood Reporter’s TV’s Top 5 podcast last week. “Everyone around him is more important than him. He stumbles onto this thing and he’s suddenly, like in classic Hitchcock movies, somebody who is an ordinary person thrust into an extraordinary situation.”

The Night Agent pushed season four of You (30.23 million hours for the week) out of the top spot on Netflix’s English-language TV chart. That series dropped to third among English-language shows, behind season two of Shadow and Bone (55.03 million hours of viewing).

Among series in other languages, Korean drama The Glory spent a third straight week at No. 1 following the March 10 release of the second half of its first season. The show now ranks sixth on Netflix’s all-time charts for non-English language shows with 413.05 million hours of viewing over its first four weeks of release.