Ratings: The Last of Us bests House of the Dragon in first full week of viewership

HBO is killing it lately, no? The network’s Game of Thrones prequel series House of the Dragon debuted to audience and critical acclaim last year, and now the zombie drama The Last of Us is the talk of the town. And the fourth season of Succession is around the corner. Not bad, TV people.

There’s really no reason to pit these successes against each other…but we’re going to anyway. Nielsen just released its streaming viewership numbers for the week of Monday, January 16 through Sunday, January 22. The first episode of The Last of Us came out on Sunday, January 15. So this period covers the first full week when the series premiere of The Last of Us was available to watch, plus a few hours on Sunday night when viewers could take in Episode 2.

The result: The Last of Us was watched on HBO Max for 837 million minutes during this stretch. According to Deadline, House of the Dragon was viewed on HBO Max for 741 minutes during the same two-episode period. The Last of Us wins!

The Last of Us gets higher ratings than House of the Dragon in its first full week of availability

And that doesn’t count the 223 million minutes people spent watching The Last of Us series premiere on Sunday, January 15, right before we rolled into Monday and Nielsen’s started taking new measurements. And we should remember — for The Last of Us and House of the Dragon both — that these numbers reflect HBO Max viewings only; they don’t take into account how much people are watching these shows linearly on normal TV.

In short, these numbers mostly tell us what we already know: that both of these shows are successes. That said, they have a tall hill to climb if they want to beat the most popular series on Netflix, which has three shows watched for a billion minutes during this period. Check out the Top 10 list for January 16-22 below:

1. Ginny & Georgia (Netflix): 1.804 billion minutes watched
2. That ’90s Show (Netflix): 1.590 billion minutes watched
3. The Walking Dead (Netflix): 1.103 billion minutes watched
4. Vikings: Valhalla (Netflix): 975 million minutes watched
5. Cocomelon (Netflix): 885 million minutes watched
6. The Last of Us (HBO Max): 837 million minutes watched
7. Wednesday (Netflix): 711 million minutes watched
8. Bluey (Disney+): 695 million minutes watched
9. NCIS (Netflix): 695 million minutes watched
10. Criminal Minds (Netflix): 659 million minutes watched

That’s a lotta TV and we wouldn’t have it any other way. The Streaming Wars continue.

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