The new year has arrived, and with it comes the familiar scramble for attention across every streaming platform.
Television now asks audiences to look up from a six-inch screen and commit to an hour of continuous storytelling on something only marginally larger.
For decades, the silver screen has always competed for viewers, but in 2026, the battle feels different. It’s not just other networks or other shows. It’s Instagram, it’s TikTok recipes, it’s whatever Elon Musk said on X this morning, it’s the spinning roulette wheel or the jangly music from online casinos now played on a phone. That’s a harder sell than it sounds.
The medium survives because the best shows still win that fight, and increasingly, the shows winning are coming from everywhere except Hollywood.
Competition is healthy. If anything, there’s too much good television right now. Stranger Things closed out its decade-long run over Christmas on Netflix to decidedly mixed fan reactions. Apple TV+ had a strong 2025, stacking Ted Lasso, Slow Horses, Severance and Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus in the same year.
Add Disney+, Prime, Hulu, Peacock, and Discovery into the mix, and you’re looking at a content library built like Thanos’ Infinity Gauntlet. One that feels genuinely overwhelming.
Subscribers are forced to choose carefully. Too many services drain the bank account and dilute interest. The best catalogue wins. But when that catalogue increasingly includes content from Madrid, Seoul, Tokyo, and Dubai, the landscape starts to look different.
Squid Game drew nearly 600 million viewers worldwide. Money Heist, Lupin, and La Palma delivered stories from across Europe that felt urgent and specific. Fauda made Middle Eastern political conflict digestible without softening its edges. All this makes the growing appetite for stories from elsewhere harder to dismiss as novelty.
This raises an obvious question. With the United States and the United Kingdom already producing such a high volume of acclaimed television, why are audiences looking even further afield? Here’s why international series are no longer just travelling well, but becoming familiar fixtures in homes around the world.
A different culture
Travel has become expensive and unpredictable, which makes cultural escapism more valuable than ever. Netflix saw a 71% increase in non-English language viewership in the US, with 97% of American subscribers trying at least one foreign-language title within a year. Audiences are clearly seeking stories that feel culturally distinct rather than merely tolerating them.
Love Is Blind: Habibi delivers a slice of wealth and social negotiation that feels familiar yet foreign. Money Heist makes you want to rebel in the heat of Madrid. Alice in Borderland offers dystopian stakes across Japan.
For audiences raised on anime, global gaming, and online fandoms, crossing borders in storytelling feels natural, not a travel brochure.
Accessibility
The success of international television is also a story about infrastructure finally doing its job. Streaming platforms have removed many of the practical barriers that once limited the reach of local-language series.
Netflix alone produces content in roughly 40 countries and offers subtitles in over 30 languages, with dubbing available in a similar range. Viewers can toggle between dubbed English audio, native-language audio with subtitles, or both simultaneously. That flexibility lowers the barrier considerably.
This is less about dumbing down than about choice. Audiences can decide how immersive they want the experience to be.Squid Game can play in Korean with Gi-hun’s original performance or in English with Greg Chun’s dub. The important thing is that the choice is there, and the choice matters
Risk, imperfection, and stakes
Perhaps the most provocative argument for international television’s rise is that it has retained that perfect imperfection that American prestige TV seems increasingly reluctant to embrace.
Squid Game is brutal, high-concept and formally audacious. It won major awards, including an Emmy for directing, while delivering violence and consequence. People die. There’s genuine unpredictability.
The finale of Stranger Things, by contrast, felt carefully managed. Risk felt present in theory but absent in practice. All the major cast members survived, often in familiar ways. The sense that anything could happen had quietly receded. The show had become so sleek that spectacle and an aestheticised, all-star ensemble completed the Duffers’ full Marvelification of a series that built its following on feeling dark, dingy, and desolate.
International shows often work with smaller budgets and less entrenched intellectual property, which appears to free them creatively. Handheld camerawork, location-heavy shoots and less airbrushed casting making them feel more authentic.
Algorithms and Adaptation
International shows do not succeed on quality alone. They succeed because streaming platforms have become exceptionally good at making foreign content feel local.
Localization in 2026 goes far beyond translation. It includes tailored artwork, adapted trailers, rewritten taglines and genre labels designed to match what specific markets respond to.
Amazon might position a Korean thriller as a family drama in one country and a violent crime series in another, depending on where the data suggests it will perform.
Algorithms quietly do the rest. Once a series performs well in its home territory, platforms test it with similar audiences elsewhere. A single recommendation can introduce viewers to an entire strand of international content. By the time a show dominates global charts, its rise can feel sudden, but it is usually the result of careful exposure.
The rise of international television does not signal a rejection of American or British storytelling. It reflects a change in audience confidence. Viewers in 2026 are comfortable navigating different languages, styles, and cultural perspectives
Hollywood still produces exceptional work, but it no longer holds a monopoly on what qualifies as unmissable television. The competition has become global, and the best content is coming from everywhere at once.
