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At the start of any given year, journalists and industry watchers will sit down, review the projects slated to be released over the next 12 months, and attempt to formulate a farmer’s almanac of sorts—predicting the hits and pop cultural milestones that will dominate the news cycle.
There isn’t much of a science to it, save for known qualities such as star power, popular franchises and patterns of consumption, but even with those measures in place during a regular year, sure-fire hits can still end up flopping while smaller projects explode in popularity. It’s an unpredictable industry.
Then you get an overall unpredictable year like this one. Few could have foreseen the circumstances of 2020’s COVID-19 pandemic, which has shut down the film and television industry outright, shuttled all major theatrical releases and created a large and captive audience for streamed content. In many ways, the year became a bit of a wild west in terms of content consumption, with everyone desperate to figure out what would resonate. True crime? Sure! Feel good comedy? Yup. Drag queens? You bet.
Read this next: What’s New on Netflix Canada—Plus, What’s Leaving—in September
So what have Canadians been watching on their streaming platforms? Here are the most popular shows and movies from the past five-plus months of lockdown.
Amazon Prime
most popular shows and movies during quarantine: little fires everywhere
(Photo: HBO)
TV Shows
Try as we might, we couldn’t get our hands on official data from Amazon Prime, but we were able to make some educated guesses at what has been attracting eyeballs based on tangential evidence, like what shows have been getting the most press and generating the most conversation online. Hulu acquisition Little Fires Everywhere has been generating a ton of attention over the last few months, as has The...