'Virgin River' surpasses 'Suits' on streaming: What you need to know about the Netflix romantic drama

Virgin River is setting streaming records for Netflix. The soapy small-town drama, which first premiered in 2019, just toppled Suits from its three-month hold at the top of the Nielsen streaming charts.

Despite its supremacy on the popular streaming service, Virgin River isn't exactly a TV newcomer. The show released Part 1 of Season 5 in September, with two episodes in Part 2 slated to debut in late November. Still, the program has managed to achieve the "Netflix Bump," in which a series that has already existed on a streaming platform rises significantly in viewership and prominence.

Here's a look at why Virgin River is riding high, four years after its debut.

What's Virgin River about?

The romantic drama follows Mel Monroe, a nurse practitioner and midwife with a troubled past who leaves her life in Los Angeles for a fresh start in the northern California town of Virgin River. However, when she arrives, she discovers that things are more complicated than they initially seemed. Based on the award-winning book series of the same name by Robyn Carr, the Netflix series premiered in 2019 with Alexandra Breckinridge in the starring role.

Shot in British Columbia, Canada, the series soon became a fan favorite. The show has already been renewed for a sixth season, with the writers room already hard at work.

Was Virgin River a hit when it premiered?

Upon the series' initial release and its subsequent seasons, Virgin River became a reliable standby for fans looking to envelop themselves in small-town drama. Its ratings reflected that appreciation, with the show serving as a solid backbone of Netflix's original programming. Several critics found their own form of appreciation for the series, which felt like a balm amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

"It's Dawson's Creek for broken grown-ups," The Guardian said. "Follow the winding Virgin River to the sea of comfort that awaits."

The series was not viewed as a prestige vehicle full of excitement and intrigue.

"Virgin River is not the kind of show that has you on the edge of your seat waiting to know what's going to happen next. What's going to happen is always extremely obvious," according to Slate.

"The perception of the show, which is rarely talked about with any depth in the media, is that it's not very exciting," said Salon. Still, the outlet credited the series for featuring stars over 35, writing, "It's one of the few programs that refuses to play by the ancient, misguided rules of Hollywood, which tend to claim that a woman is washed up by the age of 30 but men in the 60s can still be leading men."

Why is everyone watching Virgin River?

Simply put, it probably feels like everyone is watching the series because statistics show that they, in fact, are.

The series surpassed the streaming success that is Suits to the number one overall spot on Nielsen streaming rankings for the week of Sept. 11-17. Virgin River Season 5, which was released on Netflix on Sept. 7, improved by 7 percent from the previous week with 2.05 billion minutes of viewing. While Suits is still holding strong in the number two spot, its viewership dropped by 19.5 percent to 1.9 billion minutes, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Add in the fact that Netflix displays the series in the number one slot when you log into the streaming platform, viewers who wouldn't initially be interested may be intrigued to watch.

Who else is benefitting from the Virgin River boom?

Earth, Wind & Fire. The band's hit song, "September" skyrocketed to the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s Top TV Songs chart. Played in the third episode of the fifth season, the song received 19 million official on-demand U.S. streams and 8,000 downloads in September 2023, according to Luminate. While some of that can be attributed to the love the song receives each September, its appearance on the show likely played a contributing role. Two other songs featured in Virgin River Season 5 rounded out the top 10 on the Billboard Top TV Songs chart, "In the Shadows," by Amy Stroup and Lily Allen's cover of Keane's "Somewhere Only We Know."

The cozy, soapy genre continues to thrive as well thanks to Virgin River's success. Sullivan's Crossing, also based on a book series by Robyn Carr, has arrived in the U.S. While the show debuted in Canada in March, the pilot aired on the CW Oct. 4. Sullivan's Crossing stars Morgan Kohan as a neurosurgeon who returns to a small town in Nova Scotia, and also features Scott Patterson and Chad Michael Murray.

Sullivan's Crossing creator Roma Roth told Deadline she was "extremely confident in how [the show] was going to be received and that it would be well received with the same audience that is enjoying Virgin River."

"The romance genre has the same dedicated and loyal audience as the Marvel universe. If you look at who's going to get the autographs at those Comic-Cons, there's always going to be somebody there from a romance show," she explained.

What is the appeal of older shows?

It's not unusual to log into a streaming service and see that some of the most popular programs at the moment are several years old.

Earlier this summer, Suits, the legal drama that starred an ensemble cast including Meghan Markle, set viewing records years after it ended in 2019. The program, which premiered on Netflix in June, quickly set a record for the most streamed acquired title, with over 3 billion minutes of viewing in a week.

A similar phenomenon occurred with Ballers, which starred Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and aired on HBO from 2015-2019. Shortly after it debuted on Netflix in August, Season 1 shot up to the No. 3 spot on Netflix's global top 10 TV list with 3.9 million views, according to the streaming platform.