Netflix might be churning out slick yet empty generic sci-fi actioners such as “The Electric State,” but it’s also responsible for exposing viewers to international film and TV which they’d otherwise never encounter. 2024 saw Mexican drama series “The Accident” gain worldwide success on Netflix and an Indian crime drama that demanded attention climbed the streamer’s rankings the year prior. In other words, Netflix isn’t all forgettable Russo Brothers fare, and the latest international hit on the service is a good reminder of that fact.
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Spanish series “The Gardener,” or “El jardiner,” is a crime thriller with some romance sprinkled in, and seems to have struck a chord with Netflix viewers. Álvaro Rico stars as Elmer, a gardener who was left unable to feel emotions following a car accident when he was a child. Naturally, Elmer’s mother, La China Jurado (Cecilia Suárez), did what any caring parent would do and capitalized on her son’s inability to feel by turning him into a hitman. While the mother and son pair are running a garden center, they’re also running a murder-for-hire business that sees Elmer killing various victims and burying them amid his impressive blooms. Unfortunately for his mother, after Elmer is tasked with murdering nursery school teacher Violeta (Catalina Sopelana), he instead falls in love with her, suggesting his feelings aren’t quite as dead as they seemed. This prompts his mother to do all she can to fulfill the contract despite her son’s newfound ability to form a human connection.
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Filmed in the Spanish locales of Pontevedra, Toledo, and Madrid, “The Gardener” certainly has the premium sheen we’ve come to expect from these Netflix series, and while that silky bokeh can often feel like an attempt to distract from the fact that the show itself isn’t actually any good, this one has managed to not only hit the charts in the U.S. but become a worldwide success.
The Gardener takes root in the Netflix top charts
Netflix has been serving up some decent offerings so far this year. Agatha Christie fans no doubt loved the chart-busting murder mystery series “The Residence” when it hit Netflix in March, and now a disturbing docuseries about kidfluencers is taking over Netflix’s charts, which should be simultaneously fascinating and infuriating. Now, “The Gardener” has arrived to keep viewers in a stream-induced trance, and so far it’s working.
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The six-episode series hit Netflix on April 11, 2025 and according to streaming viewership tracker FlixPatrol, quickly became a hit. In the U.S., the show hit number six on the most-watched TV charts on April 12, before rising to number three the following day. As of April 14, the show remains in the third spot but could well continue its impressive rise to take the top spot as the week plays out.
Even if it can’t quite manage that, “The Gardener” has already topped the charts in other countries. At the time of writing, the series is number one in 54 countries, and even more impressively, has been number one since its Netflix debut in 26 of those markets. “The Gardener” is charting in 88 countries overall, and is no lower than number five in all but three of them. All of which makes this romantic crime thriller a global hit. Whether it can maintain its momentum remains to be seen, but however you look at it, that’s a pretty impressive debut and has landed “The Gardener” at the number three spot on the worldwide Netflix charts (as per FlixPatrol).
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Can The Gardener hit number one in the United States?
At the time of writing, there are no top critic reviews for “The Gardener” over on Rotten Tomatoes, making it difficult to gauge how the Spanish thriller has been received. There are two critic reviews, however, both of which are negative and one of which is outwardly hostile to the show. Over on IMDb, “The Gardener” has a 6.2 out of ten rating based on 620 reviews, which doesn’t make for the most reliable indication of its quality, but take that for what you will.
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As anyone who pays even a little attention to developments in the streaming sphere will know, however, a show or movie’s quality is absolutely no indication of how well it will fare on the various platforms’ charts. Heck, we’ve seen Kevin Hart’s “Lift” prevail on the Netflix rankings and Sandra Bullock just scored a Hulu hit with a horror that bears a truly horrifying 7% RT score. Series aren’t much better, either. Despite some interesting stuff emerging in recent months, we’re only just getting over the time a Tyler Perry series thrived in the Netflix charts despite having been described by The Guardian as “a disaster with one-dimensional characters and haphazard plotting.”
As such, there’s everything to play for when it comes to “The Gardener” and its chances of hitting number one. In order to take the top spot in both the United States and worldwide, the series will need to dethrone the aforementioned kidfluencer documentary and the new season of “Black Mirror,” which, considering /Film’s review surmised that the British show is out of ideas, might not be all that difficult.
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