The first episode of Westworld, HBO’s futuristic series based on Michael Crichton’s 1973 movie drew 2.8M viewers from the linear channel in Live + 3 Day viewing, Nielsen stats show. That’s up from the 2.3M viewers who watched Live+Same Day, contributing to the L+SD 3.3M total viewers on TV and on HBOGo/HBO Now streaming platforms.
In the demo, Westworld logged a linear L+3 1.46M demo viewers.
These L+3 stats are for the first-run telecast; HBO has run the episode multiple times across its platform and the stats do not include non-linear viewing. So the 2.8 million represents a fraction of the actual final number of people who will watch the premiere episode.
The first episode’s L+SD stats already made it the most watched HBO drama series premiere in the combined metric since the debut of True Detective nearly three years ago, which also averaged 3.3 million multiplatform viewers. (Of the 3.3 million, 2.3 million viewers came from the linear channel.) Westworld more than doubled the Live+Same Day debut of HBO’s high-profile but short-lived rock ‘n’roll drama Vinyl, which opened with 1.4 million total across platforms in February.
The well-reviewed AI drama, written/executive produced by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy and executive produced by J.J. Abrams, also had opened strong on Twitter, surpassing any recent drama debut on HBO, including True Detective.
HBO’s biggest series — drama or comedy — is megahit fantasy drama Game of Thrones. It launched in 2011 with 2.2 linear viewers for the premieres (that was well before the launches of HBO Go and HBO Now).
Westworld centers on a Western-themed amusement park for the wealthy, who romance and kill life-like androids while the park’s creators monitor the action, tweaking its robotic bugs.
