The Twelve

Mathijs Seuntjens' The Twelve (Dutch: De Twaalf) launched on the Belgian public broadcaster Eén in November 2019 and was acquired by Netflix for global distribution shortly afterwards, becoming one of the streamer's most-watched non-English-language titles in early 2020 and reaching the platform's top ten in over twenty countries during its launch weeks.

The series is a ten-episode Belgian Flemish-language courtroom drama created by writers Sanne Nuyens and Bert Van Dael. It is partly the product of the Belgian commercial-television funding model, which has produced an unusually high number of Netflix-acquired Flemish-language scripted series since the late 2010s (The Break, Tabula Rasa and Hidden Assets all released through similar pipelines in roughly the same period. The Belgian model) small-scale public-broadcaster commissioning followed by international streaming acquisition, has made Belgian Dutch-language productions disproportionately visible on Netflix's European catalogue.

The cast is led by Maaike Cafmeyer in the central courtroom role, with Tom Van Dyck, Charlotte De Bruyne, Annemiek Dekkers and Saskia Reeves in major supporting parts. Seuntjens (who had previously directed episodes of Beau Séjour for Eén/Netflix) directed all ten episodes of the run himself. The series was deliberately structured to follow the Belgian assize-court tradition, where lay-juror panels of twelve are still used in capital criminal cases (one of the few European jurisdictions to retain a twelve-juror jury in the Anglo-American sense). A second season was reportedly developed but has not been produced.