TV Ratings: ‘House of the Dragon’ Is HBO’s Biggest Premiere Ever

Rick Porter
·2 min read
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The premiere of HBO’s House of the Dragon pulled in a record-setting audience on Sunday.

The Game of Thrones prequel, which is set about 200 years before the previous series and focuses on the Targaryen family, drew nearly 10 million viewers across all platforms in the United States, HBO says. That’s the biggest series premiere in HBO’s history.

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The premiere also was the best series launch to date on HBO Max in the United States, Latin America and the so-called EMEA region — Europe, the Middle East and Africa. (Per usual, streaming figures aren’t broken out.)

“It was wonderful to see millions of Game of Thrones fans return with us to Westeros last night,” HBO and HBO Max chief content officer Casey Bloys said in a statement. “House of the Dragon features an incredibly talented cast and crew who poured their heart and soul into the production, and we’re ecstatic with viewers’ positive response. We look forward to sharing with audiences what else George [R.R. Martin], Ryan [Condal] and Miguel [Sapochnik] have in store for them this season.”

House of the Dragon also brought in the largest single-night audience for HBO since the series finale of its parent show drew 19.3 million viewers in May 2019. The best single-night tally since then was the season two finale of Euphoria in February, which had 6.6 million cross-platform viewers.

House of the Dragon’s multiplatform audience eclipsed that of the series debut of Game of Thrones in 2011, but their on-air numbers are pretty much the same. Nielsen figures for Sunday have House of the Dragon at 2.17 million viewers, just shy of the 2.22 million for Game of Thrones’ premiere.

It’s nearly impossible to make a completely like-to-like comparison between the two shows. HBO had a much more limited streaming presence in 2011 and didn’t even regularly report multiplatform viewing at the time. Based on the total audience figures from HBO and the Nielsen numbers for Sunday, House of the Dragon got a little under 22 percent of its total audience from the on-air debut; the rest came from streaming and on-air replays. (Over the course Thrones’ life, about 31 percent of its total audience came from people watching HBO at 9 p.m. on Sundays.)

And, of course, Game of Thrones was new to TV viewers then, whereas House of the Dragon gets to stand on the massively successful shoulders of its predecessor.

Elsewhere Sunday, a 60 Minutes repeat (5.44 million viewers) was the most watched show on the broadcast networks, while Big Brother led the adults 18-49 demographic with a 0.79 rating.

Aug. 23, 8:35 a.m. Updated with Nielsen ratings for Sunday.

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