Netflix's 6-Part Thriller Series With Rare Perfect Rotten Tomatoes Score Deserves Kudos For Its Intense Suspense
Felipe Rangel is a Movie and TV Journalist ScreenRant. He has been writing about movies and TV since 2021. Felipe joined ScreenRant in 2022, working across different teams, covering everything from breaking news to features to reviews and more.
Felipe is a writer who is an avid film and TV fan, with superhero movies and series being his biggest passion. He graduated from college in 2019, having studied Journalism. Before college, he spent a month studying at the Oxford English Centre. His superhero knowledge expands to the comics, with his undergraduate thesis being "Politics Reflected In American Comics."
Netflix has many successful thriller series, but only some of them are in the select group of the streamer's shows with a rare perfect Rotten Tomatoes score, and this psychological thriller is among them, deserving credit for its intense suspense. Netflix's library of TV shows might feature sci-fi hits like Stranger Things and Black Mirror, as well as successful shows from other genres.
However, Netflix's thriller series end up becoming the streamer's most frequent hits year after year. Netflix's 2026 TV show slate is living proof of that. The streaming service saw the return of multiple thriller series to global success, including The Night Agent, The Chestnut Man, The Lincoln Lawyer, and, more recently, Keri Russell's The Diplomat. That said, there were plenty of new thrillers.
From Unfamiliar to Jo Nesbo's Detective Hole and many more, Netflix's thriller shows have dominated 2026. This was boosted by two new thrillers, both Netflix limited series, joining the streamer's all-time TV show charts. Jon Bernthal's His & Hers did it first, with the Harlan Coben adaptation I Will Find You, which stars Avatar's Sam Worthington, pushing it off the chart.
Choose the movie with the higher Rotten Tomatoes score.
That said, none of those shows came out of the gate with a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score. That rare label was given to Netflix's Dear Child, a German psychological thriller series with six episodes that was released on the streamer on September 7, 2023. A new Netflix thriller series that has become a hit makes Dear Child a timely watch, and it deserves credit for the show's intense suspense.
Dear Child Already Starts With A Genre Twist
With a rare 100% critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes based on 11 reviews, Dear Child was already a must-binge on Netflix, especially given how it only has six episodes. That said, with the new thriller series The Trap, which hails from Dear Child's creators, now trending on Netflix worldwide, the time to watch Dear Child is now. The Netflix thriller series hits the ground running, and it starts with a subversion of a genre trope. While Dear Child's story revolves around the kidnapping of Lena Beck and the years she spent trapped in an isolated bunker, the show starts with an escape.
Rather than taking the usual genre route of a claustrophobic story that starts with a kidnapping, Netflix's Dear Child is more interested in following characters who escape captivity, but with the horrors they endured creating a constant prison in their own minds. At the start of Dear Child, a woman believed to be Lena is hit by a car as she escapes with a little girl, Hannah. This leads to the police reopening the investigation into Lena's disappearance. While the bunker is a core part of the Netflix thriller series, appearing in flashbacks and being commented on by characters, the show moves forward from the escape.
Netflix's Dear Child Is One Of Its Most Intense Thriller Series
Dear Child achieving 100% on Rotten Tomatoes is the fruit of an impeccable 6-episode run. The Netflix thriller series is eerie, intense, and heartbreaking in multiple ways. Subscribers who give it a go will be glued to their screens. Given how Hannah was born in captivity, she has a completely different read on the situation, and as a result, she behaves in a disturbing way. As for the woman believed to be the missing Lena, she had experienced life as a free woman before the kidnapping. As such, her trauma and despair are much more prominent.
Netflix's Dear Child takes a nuanced and complex look at a harrowing situation. Due to that, it has become one of the streaming service's most intense and binge-worthy thriller series. The story is immersive, the cinematography is suitably moody, the actors deliver standout performances, and the character work is as layered as it gets. Add to that the show's creative twist to how to approach a kidnapping story, and Dear Child deserves all the merit for what it managed to accomplish in the suspense territory.
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