The third season premiere of The Gilded Age delivered the show’s best opening to date.
The June 22 debut of the HBO drama gathered 2.7 million cross-platform viewers in the United States over three days. That’s a 27 percent improvement on the season two premiere (2.1 million viewers over three days) in October 2023. The series debut in 2022 drew in 2 million viewers over the same amount of time.
As is usually the case with HBO series, most of The Gilded Age’s viewers watched after the initial airing, which drew 430,000 viewers on the HBO cable channel, according to Nielsen. The remaining 2.27 million streamed the episode on Max (which likely accounted for the majority of viewing), watched a DVR recording or caught an on-air replay.
The 430,000 on-air viewers, incidentally, is fairly close to prior season premieres; season two opened with 452,000 for the first airing, and the series premiere drew 463,000.
The higher start for the show obviously bodes well for the series, which comes from Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes and Universal Television. The previous two seasons have grown a good amount over the course of their runs, with each finale drawing about 50 percent more viewers than that season’s premiere. Season two finished HBO’s 90-day measurement window with an average of 7.1 million viewers per episode.
HBO also noted that viewing of seasons one and two of The Gilded Age spiked leading up to the season three premiere. The show’s catalog drew five times more viewers (though exact figures aren’t available) in the week of June 16-22 than it did the previous week.
