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Last night’s Season 2 premiere of Girls at 9 PM drew 866,000 viewers, a slight drop from the 872,000 viewers the HBO show drew for its series premiere on April 15 last year. Sunday’s premiere was also down from the series-high 1 million that watched the Season 1 finale on June 17. Over three plays last night — 9 PM, 10 PM and 11 PM — Girls had a total audience of 1.6 million, up 42% from the double showing of the series premiere. HBO was happy right away with Girls, rewarding the series with a 10-episode second-season pickup April 30 after only three airings. Sunday’s premiere came the same night the show’s creator and star Lena Dunham won a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy Series and the show won Best TV Comedy.
Related: HBO Makes Plans For Potential Third Season Of ‘Girls’
Enlightened was also back for its second season Sunday but on a new night. The 9:30 airing pulled in 300,000 viewers, a 43% rise from its series Monday series premiere on October 10, 2011. The show drew 609,000 viewers overall in all three of its plays Sunday. HBO renewed Enlightened for an eight-episode second season on December 11, 2011, after two months on the air. Friday’s 10 PM premiere of Alan Ball’s Banshee on the HBO-owned Cinemax had 483,000 viewers. The freshman series’ 11 PM rebroadcast got 235,000 viewers and the 12 AM airing of Banshee pulled in 247,000.
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Hooray for Laura and Enlightened!
Well, to be fair, it was up against the Golden Globes — a Girls lovefest. Kind of weird timing by HBO.
Don’t forget that this shows target audience watches show on DVR. They don’t watch the shows live.
Funny how Game of Thrones, True Blood, and other actual HBO hits (which are also big on DVR and repeates) can draw a large live audience for the network. Girls is all hype. The divide between how much it’s talked about and how few people watch it might be one of the largest of all time.
Amen to that. So sick of hearing about this overrated crapfest. It reminds me of something Roger Ebert ince said about films made specifically for movie critics. By and large, most HBO subscribers avoid this show.
Game of Thrones and True Blood have a more diverse viewership that doesn’t specifically only watch things on DVR or online or HBOGO. Girls does.
Who ONLY watches shows on DVR? That doesn’t even make sense.
I almost never watch anything that isn’t on my DVR, everything I wanna watch is programmed into it ahead of time and then I just watch at my leisure, especially because I keep odd hours working nights.
Considering cancelling HBO until they restart some real entertaining series. Girls and Enlightened are the worst! Not worth the price of the subscription.
I really have to agree with you. Series like Game of Thrones and TrueBlood and etc. relate to a much wider audience men and women and these shows are constantly streamed online or DVR but still pulls in it’s live viewers. I believe Girls was over hyped they wanted to create another Sex and The City but if fell short. The audience that is trying to relate to doesn’t have cable and the people that actually view HBO are mature adults between ages 25 and up and I think girls just doesn’t and won’t find it’s audience on HBO. I’m not saying it’s a terrible show but the hype does oversee the writing and characters. It’s hard to really care about any of the characters. At least Sex and the City provided you with being able as a women to see yourself in on of the 4 ladies this show does not, they just are white girls with minor problems in which they created for themselves.
no one does.
The empress has no clothes, literally and figuratively.
These ratings were at the same time Directv had HBO and other movie channels having a free preview weekend. I would think more people would have checked it out. I personally enjoyed watching Shameless on Showtime, a hilarious show for sure.
Free preview viewers wouldn’t be counted in this.
… why not?
I don’t know but HBO does not include the free viewers in the ratings reported.
Guessing the Globes is responsible. Interested to see the DVR numbers and how many watch on HBO Go.
The Globes didn’t hurt Shameless, which pulled in more than double these numbers, so I’d say you guessed wrong.
Shameless is actually good.
Was going to kill myself after seeing GIRLS win awards last night, but this gives me a reason to live…
You were going to kill yourself because you have bad taste and can’t recognize great writing? Really?
Yes! I have terrible taste and can’t recognize great writing! I like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Homeland, Community, Downton Abbey, loved Battlestar Galactica and Buffy and pretty much everything Judd Apatow has done until this…but I must have terrible taste if I think Girls is sloppy, boring, and lame. The only explanation is that I have bad taste.
Sloppy, boring, and lame – couldn’t have described Girls better myself. I think many of us girls had high hopes about the show, which contributed to the hype. I am bored to tears watching, not laughing and thinking, “Was that supposed to be funny?”
Don’t be a putz…. GIRLS is a crapfest.
It’s a truly horrible show with some of the most unlikeable un-empathetic, selfish, mean-spirited characters I’ve seen since the first 3 or 4 seasons of Family Guy.
Yes, and Lord knows that show was taken off the air quickly. Or, wait…
Also, since HBO is not ad supported, they count the cumulative viewership. So, if 509,000 people watch live and 3 million watch OnDemand/DVR/Repeat viewings, it doesn’t matter to HBO as long as you’re watching.
agreed.
Actually, HBO doesn’t give a hoot whether you watch or not, as long as you’re paying for the service.
I don’t have HBO but even if I did, I would have been watching the Golden Globes.
Don’t forget that this show is garbage.
Girls and Enlightened, any non chick shows for a guy to watch on HBO right now?
If last night’s episode is any indication of the quality of this season, then expect the ratings to keep dropping. I was a fan of the first half of last year, but as the year went on, the quality dropped. The first episode this year was terrible.
Mad Men also had 900,000 viewers its 1st couple of years and it kept getting renewed thanks to awards. Same thing will happen with Girls.
But MadMen is a good show.
I think the drifting, wafty, hazy plotlines and the weirdness is what’s killing it. People would LOVE to watch a show about girls or guys in their 20s, but why can’t someone make one that’s actually funny? Not this hipster emo tripe.
Maybe Girls can get cancelled? :wishfulthinking:
No. This thing will keep getting renewed. i think they cancelled ‘Bored to Death’ for this show. Which is offensive on so many levels.
Was expecting to hate this show, but started watching and couldn’t stop. Really great writing, and it’s nice to see folks who look like most of us naked and in love on TV.
Totally agree. Love GIRLS. It’s better and more biting and more real than SEX AND THE CITY. Totally do not understand all the haters.
At least they added some black folks. There was her boyfriend(ish) and three extras at the party. Way to go!
I dig the show, regardless of whether or not she adds black people but it did make her world seem less… uh… alabaster.
Ick! This show is dull, self-important and silly hype. Remember when Chris Albrecht ran the place and HBO actually made good shows? Bewkes should clean house and start all over.
Lena Dunham’s PR people & fangirl/boys can try to spin this any way they want, but Girls got trampled in numbers by all 3 shows premiering new episodes on Showtime last night also against the dreaded Golden Globes.
When Shameless, House of Lies and Californication all beat you by hundreds of thousands of viewers on Showtime (Showtime, people) it’s a sign that your show is not a success despite how a group of lunatics decided this woman was the new Woody Allen. It wasn’t like they had new episodes of Homeland leading in for them.
Here’s a project for Dunham’s rabid attack dogs – How many homes in the US have HBO vs how many have Showtime? I’d love to see the stats on that alone combined with those ratings.
Enlightened, by the way, is a magnificent series. But with ratings like those, all of us who realize that show is the one to watch right now on HBO should prepare ourselves for this being it’s last season.
This analysis is spot-on.
I like enlightened too, a show with something to say about society and we can use its wisdom in our own life. Sadly, probably won’t stick around.
HBO = 30 million households
Showtime = 22 million households
Do not get this Girls thing at all. — brooklyn ‘girl’
I watched GIRLS last night. It was terrible. This is sad for me because I am a “girl” and I want “girl” things to be great so I can have more of them. The problem, at least with last night’s episode, is that the show lacks any subtext. At all. Ever. People just say exactly what they’re thinking and then other people say back exactly what they think about what that other character was thinking. As if that’s how human beings behave. Then Lena Dunham bravely does a nude scene. And some time in the near future the New York Times will say, again, how “brave” and “funny” it all is.
What’s really too bad is that the Golden Globe win is going to mesmerize Dunham and her collaborators into thinking they are creating quality television. Almost makes you wish there were some network executives killing the creative process by forcing Dunham to come up with something that panders to the audience. Like a STORY.
Girls makes people who read the New Yorker feel like they’re ‘in the know’ when they discuss ‘the culture’ at cocktail parties the rest of us are not invited to. Because we’re not as ‘aware.’ (Mike Meyers giving little quotation hand signs each time, please).
I honestly do not understand the bile being thrown at Girls. I can’t remember a TV show getting this kind of spiteful, bitchy, downright nasty treatment before.
This show is a bunch of self-involved tripe designed for vapid arm chair liberals. That is why it is the darling of much of Hollywood and the critic communities. As is its star/creator. The rest of us just find it and the undeserved hype surrounding this show to be annoying and wish it would just go away.
You may not like that, and be pissed off at what I said, but that jsut about hits the nail on the head. On a constructive note, at least you enjoy it.
I’m a liberal and I hate the show. don’t blame liberals.
I said ‘designed for’ liberals. I didn’t say all liberals automatically bought into this train wreck. If so, then their viewing figures would be significantly higher. In your case, it shows that your’e thinking and may have decent taste. I do not know for certain as I likely don’t know you.
I’m a liberal too and hate the show. I don’t think it was designed to appeal to liberals, rather the emo hipster types. I don’t know you so I am not really sure if you have good taste either. How do you like arrogance thrown back at ya?
“Girls” will definitely suffer from a bit of over exposure coupled with the Lena Durham deity status from Hollywood brokers. 99% of the American public have never seen “Girls” nor Tiny Furniture nor Lena Durham. I’m sure some Hollywood agenty people have already resurrected Nora Ephron in Lena body. (That came with a 3% finder’s fee too.)
I fully understand if Girls isn’t your thing… I couldn’t stand it when I first saw it. It’s very twee and very specific. But the show definitely grew on me after giving myself a little break. Lena Dunham is a great writer and she’s talking about a very specific segment of the population. If it doesn’t happen to be your thing, you don’t necessarily have to wish for it’s demise. There is already TONS of garbage on the air that is meant to appeal to a very very broad audience. We should be applauding shows aimed at a niche audience that manage to get critical attention, even if you happen to have a lot of disdain for that niche.
You are demanding that I “applaud” a show whose “creator” and staff have made numerous racist remarks and displays? Really?
No chance.
Jeez, I remember not so long ago when HBO had quality programming on that wasn’t centered around self-indulgent asshole anti-heroes. Between Girls, Enlightened, Veep, Boardwalk Empire, The Newsroom and True Blood, it looks like they’re trying to drive away viewers on purpose…and it seems to be working.