There was great news on Thursday morning in the wake of the Riverdale season premiere. No, it wasn’t that ***SPOILER ALERT*** Fred Andrews (Luke Perry) survived his cliffhanger gunshot wound. Not just that, at least. And it wasn’t that Archie and Veronica wasted no time delivering a shower-sex scene for the ages. Rather, it was that the season 2 premiere ratings were up big time.

The mark of a popular show is high ratings. The mark of a possible sensation is high ratings that get even higher as the series goes on. Riverdale looks like it’s leveling up, which is great news for everyone from Bughead shippers to Molly Ringwald fans to anyone (like me) who appreciates every delicious minute of what Madchen Amick is throwing down as Betty’s mom.

But these ratings are really something. They call to mind another TV series that made a leap in its second season and saw its popularity skyrocket from there. Nobody is going to put Riverdale in the same category as Breaking Bad when it comes to quality (I mean, how could Breaking Bad even compete with Cheryl Blossom tormenting her burn-victim mother?), but both shows made dramatic leaps in viewership after their early seasons were added to Netflix.

Riverdale‘s first season dropped on Netflix on May 19 of this year, one week after its season finale aired on the CW network. At that point, Riverdale began its shift from a buzzy teen drama on a disrespected netlet to a breakout hit on the world’s biggest streaming destination.

As you see above, by May 27th, interest in Riverdale (as indicted by publicly available data via Google Trends, since Netflix steadfastly refuses to release their viewing data) had more than doubled from where it was just one week prior, and that interest stayed well above its initial level all throughout the summer.

Breaking Bad enjoyed similar success after its early seasons were added to Netflix. Suddenly, it was no longer simply a niche critical fave on a outlier cable network but an addictive drama that people caught up on in marathon chunks. By the time the second half of Bad‘s final season premiered in September of 2013, the premiere ratings experienced a massive jump

So what, if any, are the lessons here? That you don’t have to make new episodes available weekly as long as you allow audiences to catch up to the show as it’s happening. That Netflix offers a prime opportunity for viewers to latch onto a show they’ve been hearing about for months but don’t know when to jump on. That Walter White and Jughead Jones are very much the same, weirdos who don’t fit in who also just so happen to enjoy wearing signature hats.

Stream Riverdale on Netflix