Netflix is driving home a tentpole one-two-three finish to the year: the finale of “Stranger Things,” the genre-defying Korean series Cashero and true-crime documentary Evil Influencer.
It’s a slate intended to draw everyone from blockbuster binge-watchers to K-drama fans and documentary die-hards, and comes as Netflix doubles down on franchise climaxes and globally sourced originals.
Stranger Things Finale Sets The Bar For Event TV
The Hawkins saga bows out in supersized form, the sort of high-stakes, two-hour capper that transforms nights spent streaming into appointment viewing. Netflix has tried to feature farewells, and this one is structured to capitalize on years of breadcrumbs: Will’s link to the Upside Down, Eleven’s powers under duress, Vecna’s endgame. The Duffer Brothers are completing a loop that began as a Spielbergian mystery box and became an ensemble epic.
Anticipate an equilibrium of character closure and franchise architecture. Netflix isn’t exactly shy about spinoffs, but the core mystery demands an answer to satisfy an audience that has stuck around at this point since 2016. The bet checks out: Nielsen named Stranger Things as 2022’s most-viewed streaming title in the US, with around 52 billion minutes viewed, once again illustrating just how convincingly event episodes translate into long-term exploration. If its own data trends from the Top 10 lists released by Netflix continue, such a finale will dominate weekly charts — and deliver a halo effect to earlier seasons.
Practical advice for your queue: Dedicate an entire movie night with the finale and, if you’re in need of a refresher, at least skim the last two episodes of the penultimate season. The storytelling is now intentionally circular — callbacks and visual rhymes are part of the payoff.
Cashero Is Cash, Reborn As Power And Satire
Cashero enters the scene with one of the sharpest superhero ideas in recent memory, a civil servant whose strength grows along with how much physical cash he has on him, and falls every time he lands a punch. It’s a direct, legible metaphor for hustle culture and personal debt and the price of heroism — papered over with action-comedy pacing, lifted by a young ensemble.
The show is also part of Netflix’s larger Korea strategy. After “Squid Game” rewired global viewing habits, Netflix said it would spend billions of dollars on Korean content because K-dramas and unscripted shows have had such an outsized reach: globally undergoing a Hallyu renaissance. That Korean originals would consistently rank among the most in-demand non-English titles globally according to industry trackers like Parrot Analytics suggests an appetite from audiences that is durable — not fad-driven. Cashero’s premise is particularly well-suited to that exportability: it’s culturally narrow but especially wide-ranging in terms of its appeal.
If you enjoyed the genre-mashing of “The Uncanny Counter” or the tonal nimbleness of “Moving,” Cashero’s recipe — punchlines, propulsive set pieces, social bite — should be an easy add.
And, yes, pack your sense of humor — economy jokes punch astronomically fast and then multiply.
Evil Influencer Dissects A Nightmare Parasocial Economy
Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story comes from director Skye Borgman, who previously scored on Netflix with the true-crime hits Abducted in Plain Sight and Girl in the Picture by threading careful journalism through human-scaled stories. Here, Borgman searches for an explanation for how a counseling brand led by Hildebrandt and Ruby Franke won the trust of so many online before the allegations of child abuse came crumbling down.
The real-world stakes are substantial. Franke and Hildebrandt pleaded guilty to aggravated child abuse and were sentenced to prison in 2024, according to Utah court records. The documentary contextualizes that case within a larger ecosystem of advice-as-content, in which algorithmic reach can enhance and amplify authority without the vetting that traditional institutions provide. Pew Research Center has found that YouTube usage is high among US adults, which serves as a reminder of just how enormous the platform’s parenting and self-help niches are — and how unregulated they largely are.
Think: a close look at spreading survivor perspectives and the mechanics of capturing an audience — how we build, sell and destroy credibility. It is perhaps a sobering counterweight to the escapism elsewhere on the slate.
How To Schedule Your Week Around This Netflix Lineup
If you’re triaging your time, begin with Cashero for a taste of something different and buzzy, switch to Evil Influencer when you crave rigor over razzle, and save the Stranger Things closer for one of those screen-free stretches where interruptions might ruin the spell.
Netflix’s own viewing data has demonstrated that finales power back-catalog rewatching — so be prepared for your autoplay to tempt you into “just one more” from earlier seasons.
The throughline among these is strategic: a marquee closer to control the conversation, a high-concept import to maintain global momentum, and a headline-grabbing doc to keep Netflix’s true-crime pipeline vital. Different narratives, same result — the service is hungry for your entire week, and this lineup makes a compelling argument for it.
