House Of The Dragon's Episode 2 Viewership Is Very Good News For The Future Of Westeros On HBO
"House of the Dragon" has already been doing blockbuster numbers for HBO. Its premiere pulled in 10 million viewers across all of HBO's viewing platforms on August 21. All those eyeballs have resulted in the show landing a Season 2 renewal, only an episode into its Season 1 run. That's quite the accomplishment for a freshman show, even one with a pedigree as impressive as this "Game of Thrones" prequel comes to the table with.
Getting a bunch of fans hooked on a program's political intrigue and interpersonal drama for at least one episode may be easy to a degree; getting them to stick around for more editions as the show develops and time marches on is an entirely different challenge. But it seems that the show's producers have already figured out the trick to retaining their enormous audience. They say you can't improve on ratings perfection, but Episode 2 of the drama seems to have done the impossible. Here's why the show's viewership numbers undoubtedly have HBO execs excited for its future.
The show's number ticked up a bit with Episode 2
Per Variety, ratings for "House of the Dragon" went up by 2 percent for its second episode. This gain may look slight, but the magazine reports that 10.2 million viewers watched the show over all available platforms during the episode's Sunday night premiere.
It's good news all around for the prequel program; HBO also reports that Episode 1 of "House of the Dragon" has ticked up to 20 million viewers overall with second day and beyond viewing. These numbers include +7 DVD ratings, OnDemand viewings, and other methods of watching the program later in the day. So those giant premiere numbers have gotten even bigger over time, and it's possible that if the show can maintain its momentum, it will continue to grow its totals over the show's first season.
And yet the show still isn't equaling the huge numbers its predecessor pulled in. It gained a record-setting 17.9 million viewers with the first episode of Season 8, while the second episode of that same season got over 10 million. So while "House of the Dragon" seems to be a steady performer for HBO so far, it's not hitting numbers as high as "Game of Thrones" did. However, it has outperformed "Euphoria," another modern hit for HBO that managed to secure 6.6 million viewers for the Season 2 finale.