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Audience sympathy: "The Squid Game" has become the most popular TV series in the Russian Federation
Russian moviegoers will no longer have to puzzle over which TV series to watch in their spare time. On March 24, experts from the Russian film industry took part in the presentation of a new rating, which included the top 100 projects of 2025. These are both Russian and foreign hits that have secured their place on the list due to the viewing time, the power of word of mouth — discussions on social networks, the activity of search queries and other criteria. About which projects should not be missed, and why the first Russian rating of TV series, created by Medialogia, will become a guide for both viewers and film producers, in the Izvestia article.
The most popular TV series of 2025
From exotic South Korean thrillers to multi-part Turkish melodramas, from American fiction about very strange cases and the zombie apocalypse to Russian comedy sitcoms, highly social plots and long-term detective stories that have already become classics. On March 24, the Russian Rating of TV Series was presented in Moscow, a new product of Medialogia, which claims to be a guide for both viewers and content creators. A complex algorithm that takes into account two dozen criteria helped determine the 100 most popular projects of 2025.
Unsurprisingly, "The Squid Game" topped the list — the third season of the series was released last year. The first one premiered in 2021. Then it became an event — in less than a month it gathered more than 110 million views, secured the status of the most popular Netflix project, spawned a wave of memes and cosplay, and strengthened the position of South Korean cinema. Two more seasons have been released on the crest of the phenomenal success of the story about how the poor undergo survival tests for the sake of fabulous monetary winnings.
The second place in the top 100 was taken by "Very strange things". This is a fantastic story about friendship, growing up and fighting monsters from the Inside Out against the backdrop of the nostalgic 1980s. The final fifth season was released in 2025. Russian fans were so interested in the project that it was even shown in some cinemas.
The remaining places in the top 5 of the rating were taken by Russian films. The third is the detective "Sled", the fourth is the comedy "Daddy's Daughters". Both have been familiar to more than one generation of Russian viewers — they have been released since 2007, and in 2025 they were pleased with the next seasons. Completing the top five is another long-running TV series, Univer. Its premiere took place back in 2008, and in 2025 the season "Univer. The young ones."
— It is important that finally a single national rating of TV series appears in our industry, which, I am sure, will become the main recommendation platform for our audience. This is important for both television channels and digital platforms," Anatoly Tupitsyn, executive producer of REN TV, said during the presentation of the rating. He explained this by saying that such a rating gives filmmakers more information about audience expectations.
On the sixth line of the rating is the Russian project-event of last year "Lilies of the Valley. Such a tender love." Already in the first days after the release, social networks were flooded with fragments from the series, and its actors — then little—known Nika Zdorik and Sergey Gorodnichy - became superstars. The views of "Lilies of the Valley" about the relationship between a rich girl and a simple tanker, on various platforms and on television, exceeded one hundred million.
—Viewing statistics allow us to trace the last most important link in a long industrial chain, namely the viewer's link, in order to understand and feel it more precisely, rather than working blindly," said director and general producer of NMG Studios Fyodor Bondarchuk.
For content creators and distributors, all this data is not the result of some kind of competition, but a new tool for assessing the relevance of specific formats, genres, and approaches to the creative process.
— To be honest, I thought that Lilies of the Valley would be superior to some foreign projects. This is a question for additional research. We would like our colleagues from Medialogia to tell us which components, let's say, we didn't get to be at the top. It would be interesting to understand this," Alexander Kosarim, director of content at the online cinema Wink, told Izvestia.
How was the Russian TV series rating created?
The rating developers took into account not only the time of watching TV series and online cinemas. The success of the projects was calculated using a complex formula that included almost two dozen different parameters.
— Previously, the tools [for measuring the popularity of TV series] were sharpened at one stage. It was either views, or discussion, or demand. We look at the series in a complex way. We fully analyze the entire funnel from the point of view of each of them. This describes in as much detail and as fully as possible how users consume content at all its stages," said Evgeny Mironov, head of the working group on the development of the Russian rating of the series "Medialogia".
Simply put, in order to get to the top, the series needs not only to be watched a lot, but also to be actively discussed on the same social networks to search for additional information about it online.
— For industry professionals, for producers, producers, the data that underlie the ratings are valuable, of course. Because based on them, you can correct mistakes, build more accurate communication with the audience, respond to a viewer's request or even search for this request, clarify the approach to production when working with the franchise for the second or third seasons. This is a valuable story," said Gavriil Gordeev, Okko's general producer, in an interview with Izvestia.
David Kocharov, General Producer of RUTUBE and PREMIER, and Gavriil Gordeev, General Producer of OKKO LLC, during the presentation of the National Rating of TV Series, a new product in the Medialogia portfolio
The genre diversity of the first rating indicates that the Russian audience likes different movies. Although mostly domestic. He is followed by 60% of the list. This is an objective assessment. In total, more than a thousand TV series that were released in 2025 (including new seasons or franchise series), including Russian and foreign projects, as well as animation (with the exception of children), were analyzed.
As a result, there were military-historical plots ("SMERSH"), and fiction ("Black Mirror"), and Turkish hits ("Kingfisher", "Cranberry Sherbet"), and thrillers ("Fisher", "The Walking Dead", "Method"), and comedies ("Old School", "The Simpsons"), and anime ("Van Pease"), and detective stories ("Secrets of the Investigation", "Conditional Cop").
On the one hand, all this is a ready-made solution for the audience. On the other hand, it is the basis for content producers, said Andrei Zolotarev, one of the most sought—after Russian screenwriters, who was among the first to review the rating.
— Now we can act by touch. We can now understand quite clearly what is happening to the viewer at the moment when he evaluates the product that is being offered to him," he told Izvestia. — This information is not an arrow that indicates the direction: everyone has started watching some mystical dramas, so we need to shoot them. Sometimes these ratings tell you where the gaps are, what hasn't been done yet, and which genres haven't been touched. The viewer is complex. He doesn't want the same thing. Diversity is needed. You need to meet his interests and surprise him at the same time.
It is planned that in the future the rating will become regular and will be published once a month.
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