Season four premiere of "Game of Thrones" drew an average of 6.6 million viewers, making it the largest audience for HBO since the 2007 finale of mafia drama "The Sopranos," the network said on Monday, according to Rolling Stone.
Sunday's premier beat out its season three premiere of 4.4 million viewers and topped its all-time-high audience of 5.5 million previously held by "The Sopranos," Rolling Stone reported.
"The Sopranos" drew 11.9 million viewers for its 2007 finale while HBO said a total of 8.2 million people tuned in for the first episode in "Game of Thrones" season four, according to Rolling Stone.
"Game of Thrones" averages a gross audience of 14.4 million per episode, including viewers who record the show and watch it later in the week, which many of the network's viewers do, Rolling Stone reported.
The network also said its online viewing app, HBO Go, experienced technical difficulties under heavy demand for "Game of Thrones," which made it difficult for some users to access the show, according to Rolling Stone.
On Monday, showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss said that more death was "inevitable" as the season pushes along, according to Rolling Stone.
"If a character death feels random...the audience often feels cheated, but the brilliance of [author] George [R.R. Martin's] novels is that the deaths all seem inevitable after the fact. When you go back to reread the Red Wedding chapter, you can't believe you missed all the clues. More importantly, the fear of getting our hearts broken is part of the deal, whether in real life or fiction," Benioff and Weiss said, Rolling Stone reported.
The debut of eccentric tech comedy "Silicon Valley" averaged 2 million viewers following "Game of Thrones," while the season three premiere of political satire "Veep" averaged 955,000, Rolling Stone reported. HBO's Sunday night lineup of the three series has been lauded by critics as some of U.S. television's strongest programming blocks.
