HBO’s House of the Dragon has found its core audience! A new report by Variety reveals that the fifth episode, ‘We light the Way,’ drew 3% more viewers than Episode 4, ‘King of the Narrow Sea.’ Furthermore, Season 1 of the Game of Thrones prequel series is currently averaging 29 million viewers per episode.
Per the report, these statics are comprised of Nielsen’s measurement of Sunday's Episode 5’s four cable airings with the number of streaming viewers across HBO Max and other HBO platforms. Nonetheless, per Nielsen’s linear viewership there’s a 4% increase when compared to last week’s cable viewers. Overall, the steady gain in the viewership reflects that fans have taken to HBO’s new offering quite well, as the series has now hit a retention rate that is likely to remain stable throughout Season 1. HBO, a subsidiary of Warner Bros Discovery, needed to get things right with House of the Dragon; while its parent company has been cutting down the scripted and unscripted content in the months gone by, the series’ success will bring some calm to the chaos.
House of the Dragon takes fans 175 years before the events of Game of Thrones. Created by Ryan Condal along with George RR Martin, and co-showrun with original series vet Miguel Sapochnik, the series takes a look at the start of the decline of the House Targaryen taking a leaf out of Fire and Blood and Dance of the Dragons books. Reportedly, 10 million viewers tuned in to see Episode 1, setting the tone for the rest of the series, gaining viewers steadily with each episode except Episode 3, which came out on Labour’s Day weekend and saw a drop of 1 million in cable viewership.
Recently released Episode 5 has brought us to midseason with a wedding between Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen (Milly Alcock) and Ser Laenor Velaryon (Theo Nate). We also saw Alicent Hightower (Emily Carey) donning her green dress, signaling her protest against the dragons. Daemon (Matt smith) has been as unpredictable and unreliable through the five episodes as the narratives of Martin's books, while King Viserys’ (Paddy Considine) health sees a constant decline. The Game of Throne-esque scheming and spying has finally surfaced in the prequel series and the real games have just begun. A few characters to look out for the rest of the season are Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) who killed Laenor's love interest recently, Ser Harwin Strong (Ryan Corr), and certainly all the kids that are grown up in the coming episodes.
Taking a leap of another decade, Episode 6, ‘The Princess and the Queen,’ will see Alcock and Carey trade their roles with Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke as Princess Rhaenyra and Lady Alicent respectively. The new episode drops on Sunday, September 25. Meanwhile, check out the trailer below: