A Shameless Erotic Thriller Is What The Entire World Is Watching On Netflix
Netflix's Obsession is a trashy erotic thriller with universal appeal.
Spring is in the air, which means all the cute couples are out enjoying the nice weather. Meanwhile, the couples who don’t like the sunlight quite as much are huddled in theaters watching hilariously bloody comedies like Renfield (certainly, Dracula knows a bit about avoiding the daylight hours). Meanwhile, the rest of us are huddled around Netflix watching Obsession, the shameless erotic thriller TV series that FlixPatrol reports is in the Top 10 for dozens of different countries worldwide, including major markets like Australia, India, and the majority of South Ameria.
Why is this Netflix television series so popular with global audiences? Honestly, it’s probably the fact that sex continues to sell in the streaming era, and this steamy series has a lot of raw erotic appeal. The streaming giant understands how much its audience likes erotic scenes (one of the reasons they kept adding them to The Witcher over Henry Cavill’s objections), and this new show is proof that sex really is the universal language.
What is Obsession actually about, though? The show is based on a book named Damage by Josephine Hart, and the Netflix series focuses on a surgeon named William who falls in love with his son’s fiancée. Once the infatuation turns into the titular obsession, though, William’s inappropriate relationship threatens to destroy the life and career that he worked so hard to build.
How do we know fans are tuning into this four-part Netflix show for the kinky sex rather than the plot? Simply put, the movie is a bomb: on Rotten Tomatoes, it has 43 percent from critics and a very bleak 25 percent from audiences. Unless you’re one of the people that really did read Playboy for the articles, you’re probably not going to tune into this erotic thriller for its scintillating plot.
While the writing for this Netflix show is nothing to write home about, we were really impressed with the casting. The beautiful and enigmatic Charlie Murphy plays Anna Barton, the young woman who cheats on her fiancée with his father. And the father is played by Richard Armitage, who is genre royalty after playing a scary serial killer in Hannibal and a heroic dwarf in the Lord of the Rings spinoff films based on The Hobbit.
And all it takes is a single episode of this hit Netflix show to realize that it has major appeal to fans of the 50 Shades of Gray books and movies. Obsession similarly presents a kind of mainstream-friendly version of BDSM that helps to awaken something in audiences afraid of what results they might get just by searching the internet for such content. As series co-writer Lloyd Malcolm puts it, the show provides a very “vanilla version of kink,” but it turns out that having a series that’s kinky without being too kinky helps bring in viewers from around the world.
If you’re interested in seeing all the fuss, this Netflix show just premiered on April 13 and is only four episodes long, so you can quickly binge it all and then participate in the online discourse surrounding this show. It’s always fun to watch a trashy Hollywood show and then dish about it, but don’t get sucked into any strange online arguments that waste too much time. If you experience a discourse that lasts for more than four hours, you may have to contact your doctor (or at least find a medical show to stream once you’re finished with Obsession).
