The final episode of season 4 of The Boys may have been a downer, but it ended on a very high note.
ABC Audio has learned that the fourth installment of the show attracted 55 million viewers worldwide, according to Prime Video, and reached #1 in 170 countries.
Overall, viewership for the fourth season of the Emmy-nominated series based on Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson‘s bestselling comic book series is up 20% versus the third.
Interestingly, for all the skewering the show did about American politics this season, 60% of the audience was in other countries, with strong performances in the U.K., Canada, Brazil, India, Germany, Italy, France, Mexico and Spain, according to the streamer.
Throughout its award-winning run, HBO’s Game of Thrones introduced viewers to hundreds of characters, which might be a tall order for someone who is trying to binge.
However, for the approximately 1 in 50 who live with prosopagnosia — or face blindness — it’s even tougher.
The show’s deep bench of characters is one of the reasons scientists out of England’s University of York used the series to study the condition that, as its name suggests, causes people to be unable to recognize faces.
Kira Noad, the lead author of the study and a PhD student at the university’s Department of Psychology, said: “We chose to show participants footage from Game of Thrones because the series captivated people around the world with its strong characters and their deeply nuanced personalities.”
The scientists scanned the brains of people as they watched the show; the test subjects included people who have seen the show and those who haven’t, and also people who have the condition and those who don’t.
The “exciting” results showed recognizing someone isn’t just skin deep, researchers say.
Senior author of the study, professor Tim Andrews, said the results “suggest that our ability to recognize faces relies on what we know about people, not just what they look like.”
He adds: “While it was believed that we recognize faces by learning their visual properties — such as features, configuration, and texture — our study indicates that it involves connecting a face with knowledge about the person, including their character traits, body language, our personal experiences with them, and our feelings towards them.”
For the record, Brad Pittsays he’s one of the 1 in 50, so don’t be put off if you ever run into him and he seems aloof.
Netflix is continuing its TV show-to-video game offerings with Squid Game: Unleashed, a playable adventure that puts you in the action based on the South Korean import phenomenon.
A new trailer was just unveiled at Gamescon in Cologne, Germany, and it teases the playable versions of the life-or-death challenges the track suit-wearing competitors face on the show.
Included, of course, is the popular Red Light, Green Light — the tease of which shows twitchier players gunned down for moving — as well as other games that have hopefuls dodging boulders, and trying to navigate perilous mazes and other obstacles. Wealth, or death, awaits, as reflected in a tag line seen during the preview: “You win some, you die some.”
“Making games based on hit series and films is one of the most exciting opportunities we have at Netflix,” said Bill Jackson, head of creative at Boss Fight, a Netflix Game Studio. “We’re thrilled to offer fans a new way to experience the Squid Game universe — one that combines the show’s pulse-pounding action with the immersive thrill of gameplay.”
The game is coming soon, the streaming service says.
