Got S5 E1 "The Wars to Come"

Great premiere episode. I loved the opening with the prophecy from Maggie the Frog. Tyrion going off to meet Dany is great. I like the addition of Varys to the storyline. I really liked the Wall scenes. I thought Jon handled himself well with Stannis, which he should. Great start!

Predictably, Game of Thrones crushed it in the ratings this past Sunday. “The Wars to Come,” the premiere episode, pulled in nearly 8 million viewers, scoring a 4.2 rating among adults 18-49. Those are the highest numbers the show has ever gotten for a premiere—Season 4’s premiere was watched by 6.64 million people. In fact, those are the highest numbers the show has ever seen. Game of Thrones has been watched by more and more people each year, and so far, Season 5 is keeping this trend going.

This doesn’t even count all the fans who pirated “The Wars to Come” ahead of the premiere, assuming those people didn’t double-dip, which is definitely possible. Even with that handicap, Game of Thrones still outpaced it’s nearest competition (fellow HBO show Silicon Valley, which pulled in around 2.1 million viewers) by a decent margin. Episodes of The Real Housewives of Atlanta and Family Guy took third and fourth place, respectively.

In each of the past seasons, viewership dipped slightly after the premiere, and then grew steadily before finishing stronger than it started, often with a few peaks and valleys along the way. For example, even though last year’s finale pulled in more viewers than its premiere, the highest-rated episode of all was “The Mountain and the Viper,” probably because word of head-squishing travels fast. Still, the show follows a pretty clear pattern we can expect to recur this year. These number are already very impressive for a cable show, and if the pattern continues over the course of the show’s seven (or so) seasons, they could get downright spooky.