The final season of Succession began with the HBO show’s biggest first-night audience to date.
Sunday’s fourth-season premiere drew 2.3 million cross-platform viewers, according to Nielsen and first-party streaming data from HBO. That’s the biggest tune-in for the show ever, passing the 1.7 million who watched the season three finale in December 2021. Per Nielsen, 598,000 people watched the on-air premiere — 26 percent of the total for the night. Several on-air repeats of the episode contributed to the total as well, but as is the usual pattern with HBO series, the majority of the audience watched on HBO Max. (Season three averaged 553,000 initial viewers on HBO’s cable channel.)
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The 2.3 million viewers for Succession is also a 62 percent improvement on the season three premiere’s 1.4 million viewers, which was then a series best. The third season averaged 7.2 million viewers over the course of its run (HBO’s cumulative figures for series are measured for 90 days after a season premiere).
The Emmy-winning series also pulled in a bigger first-night audience than that of season two of The White Lotus (1.5 million), which went on to average better than 10 million viewers per episode. Among recent HBO shows, only The Last of Us, House of the Dragon and Euphoria have drawn bigger premiere-night audiences.
Succession wasn’t the only premium cable show to have a very good weekend: The season two premiere of Yellowjackets on Showtime also hit a series high with about 2 million cross-platform viewers.
March 28, 8:50 a.m. Updated with linear ratings from Sunday.
