In a Sunday night of Season 2 Premieres, HBO’s Game of Thrones showed which show was king of Sunday nights. Game of Thrones set a series’ high rating of 3.9 million viewers in its initial 9 pm airing, while two encores brought the number up to 6.3 million. Meanwhile AMC’s The Killing stumbled out of the blocks.
Not only delivering the head of The Killing on a silver platter, the HBO series based off of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels also won the coveted 18-49 age demographic, also beating out other cable contenders such as Mad Men, Housewives of Atlanta, and women’s college basketball.
The first season of GOT served primarily as set up for the second season and its coming war on the horizon, but the first season’s finale gave its viewers a gratifying and satisfying close, while still leaving a severe thirst for more. DVDs and Blu-rays of the first season released a month prior to the Season 2 premiere only fueled that frenzy even more.
With these kind of numbers on the premiere, a Season 3 order announcement should be soon forthcoming, with a strong possibility for a Season 4 order too. Showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have been very vocal about breaking up Martin’s third novel, A Storm of Swords into two seasons instead of condensing it into one per, which Season 1 and 2 did by adapting A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings.
