It was a big weekend for high-quality genre programming as three of the biggest shows on television had major events.
On Saturday, the mid-season premiere of “Doctor Who” pulled in 6.18 million viewers and a 29.8% share on Saturday night in the UK. That’s about on par with the first five episodes of the seventh season thus far. No word on BBC America’s ratings as yet for the episode.
On Sunday, AMC’s “The Walking Dead” wrapped its third season while HBO’s “Game of Thrones” launched its third. Both broke records for their respective shows.
‘Dead’ scored 12.4 million total viewers, with 8.1 million in the key 18-49 demographic. That’s considerably up on the second season finale (9 million total viewers), and just ahead of the third season’s mid-season premiere a few weeks ago which scored 12.3 million viewers.
In the realm of the much more limited audiences of premium cable, ‘Thrones’ returned with 4.4 million viewers tuning in for the third season premiere – up from 3.9 million for the second season launch.
However, as ‘Thrones’ premiered opposite ‘Dead’, quite a large audience opted for viewing one of the two subsequent reruns of ‘Thrones’ later in the night. When added in, the total comes to 6.7 million viewers – not including either HBO OnDemand, HBOGo or DVR figures.
Another finale on Sunday was History’s “The Bible” mini-series which closed of its run with 11.7 million total viewers (3.8 million in the key demo).
Source: TV Line
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