Europe Goes Global
The story of Money Heist is usually told like this: it flopped badly in Spain, then became a worldwide hit on Netflix. Looking into it, half of that holds and half of it misleads.
The first episode, on 2 May 2017, drew more than 4 million viewers on a Spanish commercial channel. As a commercial-channel figure, that is not a failure. But it kept declining, and the last episode that year drew 1.4 million. The writer himself later called it a failure. So the story is not that nobody watched; it is that it could not be held.
The other thing easily left out is that after Netflix bought the rights in December 2017, it remade the work. The original long episodes were recut into 22 episodes of about 50 minutes. What landed worldwide was not the same thing but the re-edited version. And from part 3 onward, Netflix made it itself.
DARK, from Germany, which began streaming in December 2017, left from the same harbour. Netflix's own wording is worth copying exactly: "the first Netflix original series produced in Germany." That is a statement about production, not about streaming.