Late actor Eric Dane was best known for his roles as Dr. Mark “McSteamy” Sloan on Grey’s Anatomy and as Cal Jacobs on HBO’s Euphoria. But in the months since his death from ALS in February 2026, fans have rediscovered another Dane-led drama, and they can’t get enough.
Twelve years after The Last Ship premiered on TNT in 2014, with Dane starring as Navy Captain Tom Chandler, the show has surged in popularity, generating millions of streams over the summer.
Netflix added The Last Ship to its platform in June, four months after Dane’s death at 53, and it took off right away. Within days, the first season had been streamed so many times that quickly became the third most-watched show on Netflix, according to ComicBook.com.
That ranking landed it among Nielsen’s Top 10 overall movies and shows for the last week of June, per Screen Rant. By late July, the outlet reported that the The Last Ship had racked up an “impressive 1.2 billion minutes viewed on Netflix, proving that the often overlooked series still has plenty of life left.”
Fans and critics continue to revisit the action-packed series; on August 28, CBR declared it “TV’s smartest 5-season binge.”
What is The Last Ship About?
The Last Ship was loosely based on a 1988 novel of the same name by William Brinkley and produced by Michael Bay long before anyone had heard of COVID. The series takes place after a global pandemic wipes out 80 percent of the world’s population.
In the show, the fictional Red Flu causes “dementia, festering red lesions, organ failure, and eventually death,” per CBR. Dane’s character leads the crew of a U.S. naval destroyer that becomes the world’s last hope to develop a cure and save what they can of the human race.
In 2017, Dane told Build that the show’s writers “do a good job making me look much more badass than I am,” adding, “He’s also a very conflicted, reluctant hero, which I find to be interesting. He doesn’t want any part of being that guy, and through circumstances beyond his control, he always finds himself right there.”
When asked what element of his character he related to most, Dane said, “I guess I relate to the conflict. There’s a lot of things about Tom Chandler that aren’t me, but there are some things that, you know, you can’t help as an actor bringing yourself to the role. But I like to think of myself as a very sincere, honorable person and I think Tom Chandler has those qualities as well.”
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